


We Fill the Skies

by soundofez



Series: Four Fools and a Fire [1]
Category: Leagues and Legends - E. Jade Lomax, Soul Eater
Genre: (Black Star), (Buttataki Joe), (Dengu Dinga), (Flash), (Liz Thompson), (Maynard Johannesburg), (Patty Thompson), (Sarge | Garth), (Sid Barett), (Soul Eater Evans), (Yumi Azusa), Crossover, Gen, Resbang 2019, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-01-16
Packaged: 2021-02-24 21:01:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 27,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22004395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soundofez/pseuds/soundofez
Summary: Oscar Ford grew up traveling between his father's lowland town and his mother's desert tribe, but his favorite stories were the ones from the mountains. He loved most the idea of vigilantes, of people doing good even when it was illegal.Jack Lantern had been born in the mountains, where tales of heroes chased children around the schoolyards. Jack didn't care so much for the heroics, though, just for the helping.Harvey Clair hadn't expected any herowork in his career. Sages often didn't.J. Kim wanted nothing to do with heroes at all.
Relationships: Kim Diehl & Jacqueline O. Lantern Dupré & Harvar D. Éclair & Ox Ford
Series: Four Fools and a Fire [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1583935
Comments: 22
Kudos: 11
Collections: Soul Eater Resonance Bang 2019





	1. Prologue.

**Author's Note:**

> yup that's right it's resbang time!! my artist this season has been [@azroazizah](https://azroazizah.tumblr.com/), the sweetest most enthusiastic most amazing artist who i cannot love on enough. zi, you are a gift, a delight, an absolute miracle. never forget that. ♥
> 
> all the love for my amazing beta [@arialis](https://arialis.tumblr.com), who had to put up with all sorts of screaming tantrums at miscellaneous hours, as well as to [@goonlalagoon](https://goonlalagoon.tumblr.com), [@happyisahabit](https://happyisahabit.tumblr.com), [@mystery-shrouded](https://mystery-shrouded.tumblr.com), and [@victoriapyrrhi](https://victoriapyrrhi.tumblr.com) for additional support
> 
>  **Links:** [ [my tumblr](https://soundofez.tumblr.com) | [fic post](https://soundofez.tumblr.com/post/190292389228/we-fill-the-skies) ] [ [@azroazizah](https://azroazizah.tumblr.com/) | [art #1](https://azroazizah.tumblr.com/post/190302886225/my-hand-is-numb-but-boi-its-so-worth-it-my-art) | (more art TBA) ]  
> [ beta prime: [@arialis](https://arialis.tumblr.com) ] [ support: [@goonlalagoon](https://goonlalagoon.tumblr.com) | [@happyisahabit](https://happyisahabit.tumblr.com) | [@mystery-shrouded](https://mystery-shrouded.tumblr.com) | [@victoriapyrrhi](https://victoriapyrrhi.tumblr.com) ]  
> [ [event tumblr](https://resbangmod.tumblr.com/) ] [ [crossover series](https://ejadelomax.com/leaguesandlegends/beanstalk/) ]

A boy walked into golden fire and emerged unscathed. His mother guided him safely through; his father waited on the other side. He dreamed of heroes and stars.

A boy burned with questions but did not trust the world with them. His parents did not have all the answers, but they taught him how to find them. He dreamed of love and feathers.

A girl walked out of a war and vowed to return. Her father was already lost; her mother looked for him anyway. She dreamed of justice and swords.

A girl was stolen from the place she called home. Her parents had been desperate and unkind to each other, but they had both loved their daughter. She dreamed of nothing at all.

* * *

In a parched city built upon a coastline, a boy with no siblings and no promise ran away from home. In a wealthy retreat miles up the same coastline, a boy with an older brother and too much promise attended a funeral. Farther still and up a river, in a city half-drowned yet still lively, two sisters with no home promised to carve out their futures together.

* * *

A woman from the mountains descended upon her desert family like a sandstorm, like a misplaced gale. She enchanted the children there with stories of her home and its heroes, stories filled with courage and dragons and men, good and bad. She climbed the smooth desert trees and dared anyone to join her, and when the children tried and fell she soothed their hurts and called them brave.

A woman from the mountains, estranged from her family, traveled the world in a truck that stained her long fingers with motor oil and grease. She kept her son at her side with books to distract him from his questions, so that he might never have to learn what his family had done. (It didn't work.) The day he left, overflowing with curiosity she hadn't the heart to contain, she finally gave him a name to guide him home.


	2. Chapter One. Welcome to the Mountains.

When Oscar woke up, his roommate was already gone.

This was not uncommon. Casper Grey slept at dusk and woke at dawn, a perfect eight hours. Oscar admired his discipline.

Their inn room today had a west-facing window that provided a nice, friendly view of the building next door. Oscar had fallen asleep listening to the wind whistling through the two feet between the buildings. It was still whistling now.

Oscar inspected the dwindling supply of charms knotted around his wrists. Only one lift spell left to lighten his pack, but it would be enough— they were less than a day away from their destination.

He unfolded a different knot. It pooled golden into his hand before dissolving into crystalline water. Half he poured over his head (it washed cleanly over him and vanished); the rest he poured over his clothes. (The red mountain dust still clung to them, but at least they weren't quite so gritty anymore.) Then he dressed. He took especial care with his badge. It sat quietly under his coat-cape as he stepped out into the corridor.

His boots tapped loudly against the wooden floorboards, which creaked in quiet dissonance. He reached the stairs (fifty-six steps down the hall) and was halfway down to the first floor when a commotion exploded from the inn's dining space just below.

Hand on sword, he leaped down the remaining stairs. At the bottom, he stopped, took stock of the scene, and took his hand off his sword with a sigh.

At a corner table sat his roommate, back to the wall, eyes wide and black. Across the table stood two men, one old and clearly enraged, the other with a restraining hand on his shoulder. The latter of these men was Oscar's professor, Joe Montero, who was younger and burlier than his profession might imply. At their feet were scattered maps and (Oscar felt a rush of indignation) research notes.

 _"Get out,"_ the old man spat at Casper, who didn't move.

"Sir," said Professor Montero. The old man tried to lunge at Casper, cutting the professor's sentence short. "Sir," he tried again, this time with an irritated edge to his voice, "please stop harassing my student."

Oscar took a deep breath. He unfastened his badge and stepped forward. "Cas," he said to his roommate, "you forgot your badge again." He offered the token on an open, upturned palm.

The old man froze. Professor Montero stared. Casper blinked up at Oscar.

"That's a hero badge," the old man said.

Oscar smiled politely at him. "Yes, sir," he said as Casper slowly took the badge.

The old man lifted a finger. "That man? A League man?"

Oscar let his confusion show. "Yes, sir," he repeated. "Is there a problem, sir?"

"A _League_ man?" the old man repeated. Grief and fury twisted across his face.

"He's a graduate student from the Academy, you know," Oscar lied blandly. "Majored in heroic feats. I hear he's from a good family."

Professor Montero was still staring at Oscar. Oscar smiled back, his lips a mild curve, his brows as high and as friendly as he could get them.

The old man had blanched. "A good family," he repeated, watching Casper carefully fasten the badge to his lapel. His face contorted. "A _good_ family!"

Oscar slid between the table and the old man, just in time for the old man to spit on his cape instead of his roommate. (Oscar mentally resigned himself to using another cleaning charm. At least it would get more dust out of his clothes.)

"What about _my_ family!" the old man cried, trying to shove Oscar to one side. Professor Montero grunted and pulled him off.

"That's enough!" the professor snapped. He wrestled the old man out of the building, lecturing the entire way. "If anyone needs to leave, sir, it's you! You've terrified one of my students and spit on another! You should be ashamed—"

"Ashamed! You don't know anything, you lowlander! You don't know—"

The inn door cut off the rest of the argument. Casper handed Oscar a napkin in thunderstruck silence. Their fellow customers buzzed slowly back to life, but did not approach their table.

Oscar wiped the spit off his cape and then knelt to the floor to pick up the papers still scattered there. "You all right?" he asked Casper.

Casper was fumbling with the badge. "I'm fine," he said quietly.

"Keep it," Oscar told him before he could take it off. "Just in case."

Casper looked torn. "It's _yours_."

Oscar tapped a stack of papers against the floor to even it out. "You need it more than I do," he said, handing the papers back to Casper.

Casper took them. In spite of the early hour, his fingers were already freshly ink-stained. "How do you know?"

Oscar shrugged. "Where there's one, there'll be more," he said. "And you're good at accidentally pissing people off."

"I didn't _do_ anything," Casper protested. He paused. " _I_ didn't do anything," he mumbled.

"Hm?" Oscar scooted into the seat beside Casper.

Casper fiddled with his papers. "... Nothing," he said.

Oscar considered him. "You're allowed to not be okay, you know," he said.

"I'm fine," Casper replied. He sorted the maps out of his stack of papers. "Thank you."

"It's nothing."

A boy crept out of the kitchen and approached wielding a bowl of vegetable broth. "Here you are," he told Oscar. "The freshest batch."

"Thank you, sir," Oscar replied eagerly. He took the bowl and set it down before carefully unspooling another cleaning charm over the damp spot on his cape. (He hid a smile at the way the boy stood straighter with something like startled pride.) "Where's Kilik, by the way?" he asked Casper.

"Went out with Seb to do some early morning shopping," Casper replied. "I stayed behind to review the rest of the route with Professor Montero." His voice warmed. "I found a detour through a more forested area— more shade, and I can take some preliminary notes on the wildlife. It'd take us an extra hour at most, and we're already so close that we could leave at midday and arrive before sundown."

"Oh yeah," said Oscar. "Your major is ecology, right? Lucky you, getting a head start. I can't do anything until we get to the ruins."

The stairs creaked, signalling another arrival from above. Oscar glanced over and smiled at the final member of their traveling party. "Kim! Good morning."

Kim (last name only, because even after two weeks together no one seemed to know her first name) was in the middle of a yawn. It further distorted the face she made at them. "Your enthusiasm is disgusting," she complained. She turned to the waiter-boy, who was peering out into the street. (Their professor's voice, still raised, echoed faintly back.) "Food," Kim demanded.

The boy jumped. "Y-yes, ma'am," he said, already scurrying back toward the kitchen.

Kim seated herself across from Casper and propped her elbows on the table, heedless of the maps still there. "You woke me up," she accused.

Casper scowled. "You're wrinkling my maps," he told her.

Kim glanced down at the maps in question. "Yes. And you _woke me up_."

"That wasn't me," said Casper, glaring back at her. "Take your elbows off the table, you mannerless flamingo."

Oscar reached across the table and gently tugged at a map. Kim turned her glare on him. "They make good cushions," she said.

"They're not yours," Oscar said patiently.

"They're not yours, either," Kim replied. "Lay off, Ford."

Oscar smiled at her and did not speak. Kim glared a moment longer and lifted her elbows.

"Thank you, Kim," said Oscar. He nudged his still-untouched broth into the newly empty space. Kim spared him a withering look and nudged it back.

Well, he tried.

The boy was taking Oscar's empty bowl when Professor Montero returned and collapsed into the seat beside Kim, across from Oscar. His face was still pink with anger. "Mr. Ford," he said after a moment, "you wouldn't happen to have any of those good Orkidian beans left, would you?"

Oscar stood. "I'll go bring some right away, sir."

Kim eyed him skeptically. "You're such a doormat," she told him around a mouthful of plain bread. "I still can't believe you're a hero." Her eyes stuttered over his chest, where she clearly expected a badge. Oscar thought (or hoped) he saw a flash of concern.

"Please," said Professor Montero, before Oscar could reply. "Not today, Miss Kim."

Kim pouted but relented. "Yes, sir."

Oscar traipsed upstairs to retrieve the coffee beans, and stopped by Professor Montero's room for the professor's coffee grinder. On his way back, he passed Casper and Kilik. ("Packing," Kilik explained briefly; "I'll bring your things," Casper added.) At their table, he found Professor Montero with his head in his hands while Kim and Seb fought over their food.

What Sebastian Black lacked in height, he more than made up for in sheer presence. Between the bright blue shock of his hair and the piercing volume of his voice, Oscar frequently caught himself wondering how the young man had been selected for this expedition. Even now, Seb's clamoring had the waiter-boy rushing to and from the kitchen in terrified distress.

"Here, Professor," said Oscar, lifting his voice to be heard over his bickering teammates.

Professor Montero lifted his head. "Oh, good," he sighed, relieving Oscar of beans and grinder. "Thank you, Mr. Ford."

"It's nothing, Professor."

"Teacher's pet," commented Seb, amused.

"Says the one who shares inn rooms with the professor," Oscar replied, and added before Seb could protest, "Kim's stolen your bread roll."

Kim stuck her tongue out at Oscar. He smiled back, apologetic.

Within the next half hour, everyone was fed and packed and (in Professor Montero's case) caffeinated. Oscar snuck the waiter-boy some extra tip, the professor checked out of the inn, and then they headed out of town.

Casper and Professor Montero headed their party. Oscar lingered at the back, taking in the crispness of the air and keeping an eye out for danger. In the middle of the group, Kilik hovered over Seb and Kim to make sure neither of them ripped the other's throat out.

After a few hours, Casper dropped back beside Oscar to return the badge. "Thank you," he said. "I won't need this at the ruins."

"If you say so," Oscar replied, hooking the badge back to onto his leather breastplate.

Casper shrugged. "It was ruining my coat. And you're the one with the sword, anyway."

In front of them, Seb exploded. "What is your _problem_?" he demanded of Kim. Kilik seemed to give up on his attempts at mediation and fell back beside Casper and Oscar. Kim gestured at their surroundings, as if in explanation.

The sun hadn't quite reached its hottest, but it was close. Even so, the mountain air had remained clean and crisp. The trees on the side of the path cast a pleasant shadow over the group. Just half an hour ago, those trees had been smaller and better maintained, but here they grew unfettered, leaned greedily over the path toward open sunshine.

This part of the mountains had a name on a map somewhere (had a name to Casper, perhaps, on one of the maps folded away in his pack), but mostly it simply existed. Humans liked to claim things (and indeed, a puff of red dust rising over the trees indicated a carriage traveling some distance ahead), but that did not stop the dust from coughing red over their boots and into their clothes; nor the sprouts from carpeting the edge of the path in vivid green; nor the roots from twisting under and over and under again, careless of such transient things as booted feet or wagon wheels.

"It's so _red_ ," said Kim, brushing at her clothes. "It's clashing with my hair."

Kilik interrupted, apparently unable to help himself. "We've been in the mountains for a _week_ ," he said. "You must have noticed before now."

Seb scoffed. "With her nose in all those books? I'm not surprised."

Kim's nose twisted, but she didn't deny the accusation. Oscar slung his pack in front of him and rummaged through a lower pocket. "Here," he said as he pulled out a slim, plainly-bound book.

"At it again, loverboy?" Seb chortled. Oscar ignored him. Charitably, so did Kim, who snatched the book instead.

"Seriously?" she asked, her voice dripping with scorn even as she opened the book. " _Eyewitness accounts of mountain vigilantes_? You know these are censored scraps of garbage about garbage people, right?"

Oscar smiled. "It's a first-edition copy. Less Bureau-sanctioned, more... well, embellished."

Kim had already tuned him out, but Casper repeated, "A first-edition copy?"

Oscar wrestled his pack onto his back. "Sure. Why?"

"A first-edition copy of a highly regulated publication?" Casper elaborated, and this time Oscar heard the envy. "You're not even from the mountains. How'd you get ahold of it?"

Oscar smiled again. "It was a gift."

"From the _mountains_?" Casper looked dubiously at Oscar's dark skin. "I thought you were from the desert."

Oscar shrugged. "Mom's from the desert."

"You aren't?" Kilik asked, curious.

"Dad's from the lowlands," Oscar told him. "I spent more time there."

"You _are_ an Academy graduate," Kilik allowed. Oscar's hand lifted automatically to his badge.

Casper was frowning faintly at Oscar. "Of course you've spent time in the lowlands," he said. "The Academy is _in_ the lowlands, which are _still not the mountains_."

Oscar sighed. "We have a lot of friends from the mountains," he said slowly, running his fingers along the edge of badge. "Dad met them after they'd moved down to the lowlands."

Casper stared at him. His black eyes were oddly focused, as if he were looking through Oscar instead of at him. He said abruptly, "You know people from the Academy team, don't you?"

Oscar considered the other man. "Possibly," he said carefully. "It's only been a year since I left."

"The Academy only offers two-year programs, doesn't it?" Kilik asked. "What are the chances that they only picked first-years?"

Oscar shrugged. "I didn't know everyone in the Academy," he said.

Kilik snorted. "Our University has more majors, more students, and more buildings," he said. "You already know everyone, including the rest of us undergraduates, and you're a graduate student."

"I know _of_ everyone," said Oscar modestly. "It's not the same thing."

Casper was still staring. "Do you think we could stop by, on the way back?" he asked. "The Academy." He nodded slowly as he said the name, as if the words had been a test and the sound had earned a passing grade.

"Mr. Grey," called Professor Montero from the front of the party. "Was this the detour you were talking about?"

Casper startled into focus. "No, sir," he said, rushing away to meet the professor.

Kilik kept pace with Oscar, though his eyes followed Casper. Oscar asked, "Was that normal for him? That stare?"

Kilik glanced down at Oscar. (Oscar was not particularly short, but Kilik's desert blood made him taller.) "Hm? Oh, yeah. All the time."

"At _you_ ," said Oscar. "And at Seb, sometimes."

Kilik lifted a brow. "Why are you asking if you already knew?"

Oscar lifted his own brows right back. "Because he's never used it on _me_."

Kilik elbowed him lightly. "You did help him out this morning."

Oscar sighed. "I _tried_. I think I made it worse."

"You tried," said Kilik. "Most people wouldn't."

"I keep seeing the old man's face," Oscar admitted. "He was so _sad_."

Kilik nudged him again. "That didn't give him the right to go shouting at a stranger."

Oscar shrugged. "Of course not. I still wish I knew his name."

Seb careened into them. "Gimme some sparks," he demanded, juggling a fading gold glob in his hands. Kilik obligingly whistled some out of the air.

Seb was loud with envy even as he greedily pulled Kilik's sparks into the fading magic in his hands. Kilik whistled a few extra notes, just to show off, and then fell in next to his fellow mage. "Still working on that communications spell?" he asked, leaning over to get a better look. He was nearly a full head taller than Seb.

Oscar let himself fall to the back of the group again, this time awash in nostalgia. Mages were not common, but all the same he'd spent enough time around them to know that Kilik's skill with magic was especially rare. By most standards, Seb was a fairly powerful mage, but even he had to twist and wring magic from the air. Kilik's magic was not entirely effortless, but it was close, and it was clearly a joy.

They paused for lunch when they reached a fork in the road, where the trees thinned and Casper was suddenly undecided as to whether or not to take his intended detour after all.

Oscar considered the two paths as he nibbled at a bread roll, reheated courtesy of Kilik's little camp stove. Casper's detour would have followed the trees back into the forest proper and along the bottom of a cliff, but the direct route seemed to skirt the rocky edge of another cliff. Oscar looked to the skies and wondered how many stars these trees blocked out at night.

The sky was a bright summery blue. However, a few threatening-looking clouds hovered on the far side of a mountain peak. Oscar hoped out loud that the storm, if it came, would reach them after they'd gotten to the ruins.

"We shouldn't take the detour, then," said Casper. He cast a sad glance down the forest path he'd meant to take.

"It's only a chance," said Oscar, but Casper shook his head.

Toward the end of lunch, Kim returned, bursting upon the group like a startled animal. (Oscar realized with some shock that he hadn't noticed her disappear. Him! Not notice _Kim_!) "The Academy team," she gasped.

Oscar shot to his feet and was at her side before anyone else could get there. He tried to help her sit, but she shook her head. "Things— ambush— _help them_."

Oscar wished he'd had the presence of mind to grab his water bottle. Professor Montero and Kilik both did— they offered their own. Kim snatched one blindly (Kilik's) and gulped down its contents. "Things in the Darkness," she finally rasped. "Attacked the Academy team." She nodded at the forest path that Casper had so longingly considered. "Need help," she finished.

Professor Montero looked at Oscar, who was suddenly aware of the badge on his chest. "Go, Mr. Ford," he said.

Oscar looked down at Kim. She drove a bony elbow into his gut. "What're... you waiting... for...? Idiot."

He nodded, but he still took the time to lower her to the ground before sprinting into the woods after Seb, who had already vanished from sight.

He ran. He didn't catch up to Seb, but he caught flashes of his bright hair against the foliage. They didn't waste their breath on words. They simply ran, and ran, and ran. Every minute that inched by felt heavier on his chest, and not because he was out of breath.

He heard it before he smelled it, and he smelled it before he saw it— the intermittent crack of gunfire over screaming or screeching, an acrid stench that hung damply in the air, then finally the fight.

Most of the commotion was coming from the Things in the Darkness, which writhed upon themselves, threatening claws and stingers and knives from their ever-changing forms. They seemed to have emerged from a nook in the cliff face to descend upon a wagon, and were now mostly clawing at a translucent golden surface next to the wagon.

Under the magic shield, barely visible through the swarm, were three people. One, a mage with an armband that Oscar knew was purple, was clutching at sparks, trying to pull enough magic to fight back. She'd likely made the shield. Behind her, a second person had a gun pointed at the shield, but wasn't firing— fearful of ricochet, perhaps, or of breaking the shield and letting the Things get to them. They had an armband, as well. Oscar figured that both the mage and the gunman were Academy students.

The last of the three was propped in the gunman's lap, unmoving.

A lesser bunch of Things were menacing another four people, all of whom were on their feet. Oscar recognized the one at the back, who was abstaining from the fight— Harv didn't have a weapon and wasn't trained in combat anyway. One of the others had a badge. "Professor Yumi!" he bellowed at this last person as he approached.

She yelled back, the loudest he would ever hear her (but then, he already knew that she did not deign to raise her voice in classrooms): "The wagon!"

Seb had stopped running, but as Oscar drew closer, the mage plunged into the larger pack of Things with a roar and two shimmering-gold fists. Oscar cursed breathlessly, drew his sword, and followed.

The next few minutes were chaotic but quick. Seb managed to clear most of the swarm by _punching Things out of the way_ , leaving Oscar flabbergasted— Things were _dangerous_ and generally _not punchable_ , except apparently when you had the audacity to wrap your hands in magic and throw yourself fist-first into a fight. Oscar himself cut down several Things before they could give Seb more than a scratch and was thrown against a tree for his troubles.

He climbed back to his feet before his vision had completely cleared. His glasses had fallen off, but he didn't waste time looking for them. He could tell that the swarm of Things had thinned, enough that the mage had dispersed her shield with fists of sparking gold, and he could hear the report of gunfire, lighter and sharper than that of the professor's— the gunman, he thought, opening fire on retreating Things.

Seb let out a whoop. Oscar dragged himself back to the wagon, now emptied of Things. He held himself upright for long enough to reassure himself that the danger was gone, sheathed his sword, and bent in half to finally catch his breath. His ribs complained. He probed them with cautious fingers and decided that they were bruised but unbroken.

"Excellent timing, Mr. Ford," said a clipped voice from over his shoulder. Oscar took a deep breath, straightened, and came face to face with Professor Azusa Yumi.

"Professor," he said. "We came as soon as we could."

Professor Yumi handed him his glasses. "Curious," she said. "How did you know?"

Oscar blinked until his vision came back into focus. "One of our teammates," he said. "She... I suppose she went exploring during our lunch break and ran into you? She goes by Kim."

Professor Yumi shook her head. There was a cut on her cheek that was oozing blood. "The only stranger we've seen is the wagon-driver." She glanced over at the figure still lying prone in the gunman's lap.

Without a shield in the way, Oscar could see that the gunman's armband was trimmed in the green of a guide major. The mage, a young woman with long blonde hair, was on her feet and hovering over the gunman's shoulder. A third student, a man with pale hair and a blue-and-black armband to match Oscar's badge, was already kneeling beside them. At their feet was an open pack overflowing with potions and poultices. (In theory, the pack should have been the guide's, but Oscar thought it probably belonged to the man with the pale hair. Evans was odd like that.) All of them were bleeding from various scrapes, and there was a bruise forming on the gunman's cheek.

The wagon-driver's arms had deep cuts in them. Oscar watched as Evans and the gunman bandaged the man.

"I expect you've saved us a good number of injuries, Mr. Ford," Professor Yumi was saying. "You and...?"

"Sebastian Black," Seb filled in, shaking magic from his hands and still grinning with adrenaline. "Nice to meet you, ma'am."

Professor Yumi nodded. "The pleasure is mine, I'm sure," she said.

"You were shooting the Things, weren't you?" he asked. "How'd you do that? I've always heard that guns didn't work on them."

"I magic my bullets," the professor said.

"Can I see them?"

Oscar quietly backed out of the mages' conversation and into another. "Sorry," he told a scowling man, whose foot he'd accidentally stepped on. "You okay?"

The man's eyes landed on Oscar's badge. "I'm fine," he said. His voice was soft and cold. His travelling cloak was ripped, but he bore no other sign of having gone through a fight.

"Don't mind Jack," said his conversational partner. "He doesn't like heroic feats' majors."

"Harv," said Oscar warmly. They exchanged a high-five. "It's good to see you again."

Harvey Clair nodded. He was taller and thinner than even Kilik, and as pale as the desert man was dark. His Academy-issue armband, silver for sage, sagged rebelliously on his upper arm. He had no visible injuries from the fight, probably because he'd abstained. "What are you doing here?" Harv asked.

Oscar shrugged. "Heard the commotion," he lied, because Harv would dig for answers even if Oscar didn't have them. "The rest of the University team should catch up soon."

Harv blinked consideringly at this information. "You said you weren't coming. Did you bribe your way onto the team?" He said this out of curiosity, to clarify and not to accuse, but Oscar couldn't hold back a scowl.

"They're gifts," he corrected. "It's networking, not bribery. And... The person I replaced had a family emergency."

"How ominous," said Jack, still scowling. His voice was still soft, still cold. His armband was a red that marked him as a combat specialist.

"I remember you," said Oscar. "You got a lot of detentions for fighting other combat specs."

"I fought with a lot of _heroes_ , too," said Jack, using the shorthand for Oscar's major, "because I would turn them in for bullying the guides." He did not quite say _Why didn't you?_ , but Oscar thought he wanted to.

He answered anyway. "Not everyone can be as brave as you."

Harv nudged Oscar with a pointy elbow (Oscar grimaced and tried to ignore his complaining ribs). "You say that as if you didn't hand out fake cheat sheets."

"They would have _noticed_ if they'd done the _work_ ," said Oscar. "It's not the same. I wasn't getting bruises for doing that."

"Afraid of pain, hero boy?" sneered Jack. "I swear, you're all useless."

Oscar glanced at the man with the pale hair, who was applying pressure to one of the wagon-driver's wounds while the gunman wound bandages around his torso. "Evans isn't a bully," he said.

"He doesn't _help_ , either," said Jack.

Oscar shrugged. "Not everyone can be as brave as you," he repeated.

"Why _not_ ," Jack began hotly—

"Your book," someone interrupted from Oscar's elbow.

Oscar looked down. "Kim!" he said, and glanced around for the rest of the University team. Sure enough, Casper, Kilik, and Professor Montero had joined the crowd around the wagon-driver. He looked back at Kim. "How was it?"

"Disgustingly reverent," she said, rolling her eyes. "You'd think these vigilantes were gods."

Oscar grinned down at her. "I tried to warn you."

" _Eyewitness accounts of mountain vigilantes_ ," Harv read, his head bowed toward the book. "You're still carrying that old thing around?"

"He's even dog-eared his favorite tales," Kim said.

Harv made a face. "I know. It's criminal."

Oscar smiled and didn't say, _They're my favorites because they're true._ He also did not defend his habit of folding down the corners of book pages.

"How did you get that?"

Oscar jumped at Jack's sudden proximity. "Oh, hullo. It was a gift."

Jack extended a hand. "May I?"

Oscar hesitated. "Be gentle," he told the other man, but he let Jack lift the book carefully out of Oscar's grasp.

Jack looked vaguely scornful. "Unlike most combat specs, I have a _brain_ ," he said, opening the book and scanning through the table of contents. He then flipped to one of the dog-eared pages. "'The Death of Mayor Graves," he read aloud. "Wasn't he the fellow in charge of the slave trade? I thought that was a Bureau operation, not a vigilante attack."

"They cooperated," said Oscar. "According to this account. How'd you know about Mayor Graves? I didn't think any of the Academy classes mentioned him."

"I'm from the mountains," said Jack. He closed the book but hesitated to give it back. "Can I... borrow this?" he asked.

Oscar tried not to look displeased. "If you must."

Professor Yumi interrupted them. "We're splitting up," she said. "Professor Montero is taking the ones over there—" she tilted her head towards the other professor and his cluster of students, who were in the middle of righting the wagon— "to get Mr. Kuroko to the nearest village with proper medical facilities. You are welcome to join them. However, the rest of us will proceed to the ruins once we've fixed the cart." She beckoned the two behind her. One of them was Seb; the other was the blonde mage.

"Liz Thompson," the mage said, extending a hand. "Thanks for the save."

Oscar shook her hand. "It was nothing."

"The heck are you all so tall?" Seb demanded, staring up at Harv, whose reply was too short and too quiet for Oscar to catch. Jack was scowling again.

Kim scooted closer to Oscar. He looked down at her, faintly astonished, but her eyes were fixed on the wagon. There was a faraway quality to her gaze that was both familiar and foreign.

Oscar followed her gaze to where Casper and Professor Montero were fixing up the wagon. He watched as Kilik, the gunman, and Evans lifted the wagon-driver into the wagon bed, and then he turned his eyes back to Kim. "You okay?" he asked.

Kim looked up. "Of course I am," she said, rolling her eyes, so entirely herself that Oscar wondered if he was seeing things. She tapped her cheek. "You're bleeding."

Oscar wiped at his face with a gloved hand. "It'll heal," he said with an absent glance at the stain. "Let's go send the wagon group on their way."

They helped Professor Montero repair the wagon within minutes and parted ways. Oscar didn't get a chance to chat with the gunman, but he managed to exchange a nod with Evans.

"Who's the gunman?" Oscar asked as he watched them drive off. "He's the only one I haven't met."

"My brother, Patty," said Liz. "Patrick, I mean."

"He was shooting Things, too," Seb said. "Do you magic his bullets, like Professor Yumi?"

Liz shrugged. "What, like it's hard? You magicked your hands, didn't you? Same concept."

"Keep up," Professor Yumi called back to them. She was already a good number of paces away, with Harv and Jack on her heels and Kim dragging her feet behind them.

They made swift time to their destination: a crumbling stone castle that had long ago belonged to a lord named Eibon. A drawbridge sat rotting over a dry moat; the mages spent the better part of an hour weaving strengthening spells into the bridge anyway, because no one fancied climbing back out of the moat.

On the castle grounds, they drew closer together, listened in silence to the buzzing of the wildlife around them. Greenery crept through the cracks in the cobbled walkways underfoot. Humans had once walked here, Oscar thought, walked and worked and lived. All that was left were haphazard rows of bushes and trees that once might have been well-tended.

They passed through a crumbling threshold and arrived immediately in a once-lavish dining hall, recognizable only by the massive stone table that ran up its center. Seb broke the silence first.

"Things," he said urgently, tugging magic out of the air. "Dunno where, but I can smell 'em."

"Only place for them is under the table," murmured Liz. Her hand crept down to a gun holstered at her thigh that Oscar hadn't noticed before.

Jack drew his sword. Oscar followed suit. Harv and Kim backed out of the room.

An hour and several bruises later, the room was Thing-free and Professor Yumi was directing Liz and Seb in the practice of warding the space under the stone table. "We'll need drying spells, too," she said, poking at a charm as Seb folded it. "That's... hm. I suppose that works."

"Damn straight it does," said Seb cheerfully.

Jack looked around. "There's no good place to put up a tent," he said. "Should I set up on the grounds?"

Oscar thought of blueprints from books past. "Castles like these usually have an inner courtyard," he said. "It might be more efficient to set up in one of those."

Jack glanced at him. "You _would_ bring a tent," he said.

"You have, too," Oscar pointed out. Jack looked away. Oscar watched their teammates unpack their bedrolls under the stone table and continued, "I'm sure they'll want to explore, after they're done setting up. I'll just hope we find something suitable."

Liz declined to join them. When Harv pointed out the danger of Things, Seb volunteered to stay with her. "I'm not as interested in the building, anyway," he added. "Worst case, we can mock up a communications spell and hope you guys are still in range."

"The castle's not _that_ big," said Liz. "I could cover the ground floor in a comm-spell without you, Seb."

"We'll stay on the same level, just in case," said Professor Yumi. "It would be unwise to take stairs, anyway. Too easy to get lost."

They set off again, creeping through decrepit halls. Once upon a time, these passages had been built to keep out terrible winters, but now sunlight shone freely through a ceiling that was no longer there. Oscar led the way, trusting Professor Yumi's sharp eyes to catch people before they could wander off. He did not turn down the inner corridors that would lead them deeper into the ruins— those passages were dark, their ceilings still intact under the second story above them.

They passed a partially-collapsed staircase, several empty doorways (Professor Yumi warned of traps, and Kim claimed she could smell Things through some of them), and what looked like the remains of a library before they found a courtyard with enough exposed soil to hold tent pegs down. The architecture there had held up better than it had on the grounds, but it was still weather-worn, and what remained of the decorative carvings bloomed with lichen. Oscar squinted up at a particularly interesting pattern. "The frieze," he began, "up on that western face."

Jack squinted up at it, too. "Stars," he said slowly, "going to knowledge?"

"You can read mountain script?" Oscar asked him. Jack ignored him. Oscar tried to push the question, but Kim interrupted with a snap of her fingers.

" _From stars, to knowledge_ ," the little woman said. "The Eibon family motto." Her voice warmed. "There's a theory that the Eibons were descended from— well, they've been called _stars_ , but they're really sentient beings from the Elsewhere. Like Things, except sane. But they're still considered monsters."

"Monsters are people," said Harv.

" _Monsters,_ " Kim repeated. "Anyway, the motto is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for this theory."

"Not very strong, then," Harv pointed out.

"I never said _I_ believed it," said Kim with withering scorn. "I just think it's interesting. Being a monster is usually considered a bad thing, but stars have a whole host of stories about them. One of the biggest counterarguments to Eibon's stardom is that those stories originate from the desert, not the mountains."

"Weird," said Harv. "The Elsewhere is _everywhere_. Why would stars be localized to the desert, if they're really from the Elsewhere?"

"Maybe it reminds them of home," said Oscar.

"Home," repeated Harv, skeptical.

Oscar shrugged. "Hot sun, gold sand?"

"Oh, like magic," said Harv. He considered that for a moment before he shook his head. "We don't know that _all_ of the Elsewhere looks like magic."

Professor Yumi cleared her throat. "Oscar, Jack," she said. "If this looks suitable, you may want to set up your tents before it starts raining."

Oscar looked up, and indeed, the sky had darkened with ponderous clouds. "Yes, ma'am," he and Jack chorused.

"The Elsewhere is everywhere," said Professor Yumi to Harv and Kim, "but historically it has been more stable in the desert, has it not?"

"True," said Harv. "Then... the stability of the Elsewhere correlates with which beings leak over where?"

"The Things are symptoms of the Elsewhere," Kim suggested.

"Assuming the Elsewhere has a structure at all similar to our world's," said Harv. "A big assumption."

"An enormous assumption, considering communications and transport theory," said Professor Yumi. "Mr. Clair, you just said the Elsewhere is everywhere, but by most understandings it is more accurate to say that everywhere _connects_ to the Elsewhere."

"I was simplifying," said Harv.

"Oh," said Kim. Her eyes had caught on Oscar's hands as he unknotted one of his bracelets. "You're _fast_." And indeed, Oscar had already raised his tent.

"I traveled a lot as a kid," he explained as he walked the perimeter of his tent, dribbling gold into the ground with old familiarity. The memories of vacations past softened his face into a smile that was almost real. "Weatherproofing charm," he added before Harv could ask. "Tarps are fine, but they don't help much when the water soaks into the ground under the tent. Need help?" he asked Jack, who was still struggling with tent poles.

With the tents set up, the five of them wandered the castle a little bit more before finding a side passage that led out onto the castle grounds. As they circled around to the main entrance, they spotted Professor Montero's group approaching.

"You made it," said Professor Yumi. "How was Mr. Kuroko?"

"Not great," said Professor Montero. "We couldn't get the bleeding to stop. He was unconscious when we got to the healer."

That explained why the group was so quiet. Even Kilik, usually calm and untiring, looked haggard.

"We can catch up in the dining hall," Oscar suggested. "It's almost time for dinner, anyway."

They returned to the main dining hall, where Seb and Liz were bickering over sparks. The mages had started a fire in the old fireplace-turned-firepit. The gunman, Patrick, skipped over and dumped his pack out on the floor next to them. "Didn't get a chance to do much hunting today," he said as a number of frozen bundles came tumbling out. "Usually, Sissy freezes what I shoot during the day." He managed to thwack Seb in the back of the head with his pack as he replaced it on his back. Seb yelped. Liz stole his sparks.

Evans hurried to stop Patrick's bundles from rolling too far. "Please stop doing that," he said.

"Spoilsport," said Patrick, cheerfully ignoring Seb's indignant sputtering.

Between Patrick's contributions, Kilik's camp stove, some leftover breadrolls that Oscar had hung onto, and his own store of herbs, Evans managed to cook up a decent meal. The twelve of them gathered in loose clumps around the fire to eat.

"We made it," Professor Montero sighed. He brightened. "We made it!" He looked around. "That's something to celebrate!"

"Meager celebration, this," muttered Kim. She met Oscar's gaze and cocked a brow.

Oscar looked past her, at Evans, who kept his eyes fixed on his meal. The other man's ears were red. "Better than anything we've cooked up this entire week," Oscar said. "How about some stories? What brought us all here, to the mountains?"

"Research," said Harv.

Oscar elbowed him lightly. " _Stories_ , Harv."

Patrick leaned forward. "Tell us about dragons," he said. "They're still up here, aren't they?"

"Only the nasty ones," said Harv. "No one's seen a non-rogue dragon in centuries."

"You kidding? I can actually _fight_ a rogue dragon," the young man replied, spewing biscuit crumbs with his enthusiasm. He high-fived Seb, who had thrown himself grinning across their lopsided circle. "Keep your dragonlore, sage, I'd rather be the next Slayer."

Kim rolled her eyes. "You wouldn't have the patience," she said.

Kilik shot her an exasperated look before asking Patrick, "I thought you were a guide?"

The guide's grin vanished. "What's your point, desert boy?" Pat sneered, accent going city-sharp. Oscar felt a pang of nostalgia that ran counterpoint to a chill of sheer terror.

Kilik raised both hands. "I didn't mean to offend," he said. His voice was impressively steady. "I applied as a guide, that's all, and dragon-slaying didn't look to be part of the curriculum."

Patrick swept an appraising eye over the desert man. "They didn't let you in?" he finally said. "Their loss."

Kilik shrugged. "I've found out since that they prefer their guides to be men." He sounded vaguely puzzled by this. Oscar, whose grandmother was the head of a desert tribe, sympathized.

"You aren't a man?" asked Liz, looking curious.

"I wasn't when I applied," said Kilik.

Liz looked like she wanted to ask more questions, so Oscar said carefully," The Academy admissions system is... less than ideal." To Patrick, "I take it you applied for combat spec?"

"Before I found out that combat specs were buttfaces, yeah," said Patrick.

"Your roommate is a combat spec," Liz pointed out fondly.

"Jack's still a buttface, just a different kind," said Patrick, nudging the combat spec in question.

"'S true," said Jack as he nudged back, smirking. "You'd have fit right in, Patty. Even I'm not crazy enough to go after a dragon."

"Weak," Patrick scoffed.

" _Sane_ ," muttered Harv. "It'd burn you alive before you got close to it."

"Like the last Eibon," Kim added.

"That's just a theory," said Harv.

"A _strong_ one, unlike the business with the stars—"

"We should organize our teams," said Professor Yumi, before the discussion could dissolve into a debate. "Twelve is entirely too many people."

"Twelve is a perfectly acceptable number for an expedition," countered Professor Montero. "Why, I've been on trips with twice as many."

"For experienced folk, perhaps," said Professor Yumi, "but I believe we have several opposing interests. I just want to study the local geology, remember."

Professor Montero looked unimpressed. "The _history_ —"

"Bold of you to assume human history is the only history that matters," said Professor Yumi. Oscar hid a smile behind a mouthful of cooked quail. "For that matter, geology _is_ history."

Professor Montero burst into laughter. "You're right, my mistake," he said. "What is everyone studying, then? Mr. Ford, I know you wanted to compare desert history and mountain history— human history," he added, shooting Professor Yumi a good-natured grin.

They decided upon an indoor team to explore the ruins and an outdoor team to explore the surroundings. Oscar, being more interested in the history of the Eibon family, naturally fell in with the indoor team along with Kim, Harv, Jack, and Evans.

"Can I look around the castle tonight, though?" asked Seb. His bowl sat empty in his lap. "I mean, it's a freaking _castle_. That's like, ninety-percent the reason I applied."

Oscar wondered, not for the first time, how in the world Seb's application had been accepted.

"I wanted to explore the library room more," said Harv. "I could take you."

"Take Evans," said Jack. "He needs to set up his tent, anyway."

Evans shot him a look. "That can wait," he said.

"But it doesn't _have_ to," said Jack, rolling his eyes. "Go on, they need someone who can fight— well, someone trained, anyway."

"I can fight just fine," said Evans. "And if you're so great, why don't you go with them?"

"I'd rather rest up," said Jack, waving a hand. "You got this, hero boy."

"I'll go, too," said Professor Montero, standing. "There could be curses."

Everyone had finished eating, so the four of them disappeared into the ruins. No one else moved, other than to stack their empty bowls together. Oscar volunteered himself and his charms for clean-up duty: Liz, who specialized in transport theory, magicked up some water from a stream she'd glimpsed earlier before settling beside her brother again.

"You've heard about the Slayer?" Patrick asked Kim. "I didn't think the legend would get as far as the desert."

"Who _doesn't_ know about Saint George the Dragon Slayer?" asked Kim. "He was clever, I heard." Her eyes slid to Oscar. "One of the best mountain vigilantes, it's said."

" _She_ was clever," called Oscar, unable to help himself. "And yes, absolutely, she was one of the best. She didn't even want to kill the dragon."

"Why not?" Patrick demanded.

"Maybe because they're _sentient_ ," said Harv. "And very, very old. I'd rather not kill a dragon, if I had the choice— that's so much experience." He sounded wistful.

"You couldn't," said Jack. "You're a sage."

"If I had the _choice_ ," repeated Harv. "And who's to say I couldn't, if I really put my mind to it?"

"Then you wouldn't? Even if it were killing people?" Jack demanded.

"That's different," said Harv.

"Is it?" said Jack. "Dragons kill people. That's what they _do_. You said it yourself: no one's seen a non-rogue dragon in centuries."

The conversation drifted. Kim and Harv picked up their debate on the veracity of old mountain journals and the mysterious disappearance of the last Eibon. Liz played with her magic, throwing tiny gold webs into the air which tonelessly declared, TESTING. TESTING. NO CHILL FOUND. Professor Yumi started cleaning her guns; Patrick followed suit with both his and Liz's. Jack dug a book ( _Eyewitness accounts of mountain vigilantes_ ) out of his bag.

Harv, Seb, Evans, and Professor Montero returned from their tour of the castle library with a discovery as Oscar finished cleaning up. "We found a puzzle box," said the professor, looking downright gleeful as everyone crowded around him and the small wooden box in his hands. "At least, it _looks_ like a puzzle box. What it's doing up here is anyone's guess, considering that puzzle boxes are almost always found in the desert."

"Just like stars," murmured Kim, staring at the box.

"A puzzle box?" repeated Oscar. "Like the ones from, er, Dr. Hammersfeld's book?"

"Dr. Hammersfeld has published many books," said Professor Montero, "but yes, she mentions them in _Desert Artifacts_."

"She's the one who theorized that puzzle boxes are designed to be opened by seers," said Harv. "With the addendum that the designers may have had a method to induce sight in nonseers, so that they could open them too."

"No breakthroughs on that front," Professor Montero sighed as he passed the box to Professor Yumi, who took it cautiously.

"How did you get ahold of this?" Professor Yumi asked. "Surely it wasn't just sitting around." Casper murmured something to her. She gave him a warning look, but passed the box over.

"Not exactly," said Evans. "A section of the library was preserved. Seb bust through and Professor Montero grabbed the box."

"Preserved?" Liz repeated.

" _Bust through?_ " said Kilik, looking horrified.

Professor Montero gave a surprised shout. Oscar turned in time to glimpse Professor Yumi taking the puzzle box back from a worried-looking Casper. "I didn't break it, did I?" he asked.

Professor Yumi was inspecting the box. "You're lucky you weren't hurt," she murmured. "We weren't done disabling the anti-tampering spells."

"Luck may be the wrong word," said Professor Montero. "Mr. Grey, are you a _seer_?" His voice leaked jealousy and reverence in equal measure.

Casper shifted. "Is that a problem, professor?"

"A problem!" Professor Montero exclaimed. "A blessing, more like! What I would give to be able to see magic after it's set—" He shook his head. "Didn't you know?"

Casper shrugged. "I didn't think it was important," he said, but he was subdued.

The Thompsons exchanged a look and retreated to their bedrolls. Kilik appeared at Casper's side. "It's late," he said, slinging a casual elbow over the smaller man's shoulder. "We should go to bed."

Oscar looked around. Jack had already disappeared, probably to the courtyard, which Oscar privately thought was _dangerous_ , even for an Academy combat specialist. Harv was looking over Professor Yumi's shoulder, his attention entirely focused on the puzzle box. Evans met Oscar's eyes and tilted his head, and Oscar nodded. They slipped out of the dining hall together and silently made their way to the courtyard. (Oscar counted each of the square columns as they walked past. Sixty-four.)

A golden light flickered out in Jack's tent as they approached. Oscar bid Evans good night and crawled into his tent. He didn't fall asleep until the storm came, drowning out the crickets with rolling thunder and rainfall, and then he dreamed of stars.


	3. Chapter Two. Promises to Keep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  _(art by[@azroazizah](https://azroazizah.tumblr.com/))_

Two weeks ago, Oscar had fallen in love.

Oscar knew everyone, or he knew of everyone. J. Kim was no exception: he knew her to be arrogant and rude and dismissive and her grades to be impeccable. Kim would not help anyone, no matter how she was asked or flattered. She once took bribes, but she paid them back so minimally that the bids had long since petered out.

He didn't need the help, and anyway she was in applied Elsewhere studies, far removed from his own major in desert history. He disapproved of her on principle, but otherwise he put her and the rumors out of his mind.

Except the rumors hadn't warned him that she was _small_ , or that she loved to tell stories. (Ugly stories, more often than not— stories of monsters and the men who killed them— but Oscar loved stories too much to not listen.)

Two weeks ago, on the day the Eibon team left for the mountains, Oscar met Kim for the first time. He did not despise her the way he thought he would.

J. Kim was small and sharp and _smart_. She called people monsters and told them exactly why, by the purple-dyed hair that made them look like hags or the rambling wordiness that made them sound like sphinxes. She picked fights to have them, not to win them, and her fights were loud and conspicuous enough that people thought she liked them.

Oscar knew better, or he thought he did. He knew, or he thought he knew, when fights were desperate. He just didn't know _why_ they were desperate.

So he didn't fight her. (He didn't ask questions, either— she'd turn those into a fight.) He smiled and lied and waited for her trust.

He earned the name "loverboy" for his troubles. It was the first name he felt he had earned.

* * *

A month ago, Oscar was in the University library finishing up a paper for Professor Stamis when someone collapsed into the seat opposite him.

Oscar glared up at the intruder. The intruder, Oscar's self-proclaimed rival, glared back with lofty disdain that Oscar had come to expect from those green eyes.

He went back to his paper. "Come to gloat?" he asked flatly.

"Hardly," said the other man scornfully, but his voice was cracked and high with stress. He glowered for another moment at Oscar's lowered head. Finally, he said, "My position on the Eibon team is opening up."

Oscar carefully struck through a line of his essay. "Is that so."

His rival made no reply. Silence descended between them, wound tighter by the ambient quiet of the library.

"Congratulations, Ford."

Oscar looked up.

"You're going to the ruins," the other man continued. There was an utterly foreign, _tired_ note to his voice. He scrubbed a hand over his face and left it over his eyes. "I put in a word for you, so don't mess it up."

Oscar considered the man sitting across the table. "... I can't do any worse than you would've, Albarn," he said.

Under his hand, Albarn's mouth broke into a reluctant grin. "Rude." He took a deep breath and slowly, slowly dragged himself out of his seat. "Anyway, have fun. Good luck."

Oscar watched him go. Max Albarn was usually all wiry strength and indomitable pride, a ramrod straight spine and perfect square posture, but now his back was bowed, his shoulders quietly sloped. Oscar had never realized before how thin his classmate was, how small and fragile. It looked wrong.

He turned back to his paper. They weren't friends, he reminded himself. And Albarn had plenty, anyway, if he needed a shoulder to cry on.

* * *

The summer after Oscar graduated from the Academy for the Education of Potential Adventurers and Legends in Rivertown, his parents took him to the desert to visit his maternal family.

He'd visited before, but he had been a child then. He'd been too small to go hunting, and his father had declined in favor of the quieter work of stitching tents and cleaning game and tending to the camels. His mother was not invited. Women of the desert managed men, not nature.

His grandmother was a stern woman who had never quite forgiven her daughter for leaving their nomadic life, but who loved her family all the same. As a child, Oscar had stumbled clumsily between these two women and their fights until his father had quietly pressed Academy admissions forms into his hands to keep them busy; after that, they spent their evenings pretending together that they couldn't hear the bickering from the next tent over. (Eventually, Oscar buried his head in enough papers that he didn't need to pretend.)

He'd forgotten how sounds carried in the desert. Here there were no walls, only distance and sand and pretending not to hear any of the whispered fights. He'd been bad at that last point when he was a child, when solutions seemed easy and fights needed to be stopped more than they needed to _be_. He knew better, now, but it was still hard to pretend, even knowing that the answers were hard and sometimes fights were the only way to get to them.

So he hiked out into the dunes. When nomads needed to fight without whispers, they would go to the dunes and let the wind carry their words away. Oscar went farther, where his mother used to take him and press his hands up against the skin of the world, where he could break through to the Elsewhere if only he _pushed_.

His mother was not a mage. A mage pulled magic into the world by drawing on the Elsewhere's attraction to them, and that same attraction would suck them in if they ever managed to break through. His mother was not a mage, or not that kind of mage, and so she was safe when she broke the skin of the world and stole magic for herself and stitched the world back stronger. It could be taught, this breaking and weaving, but Oscar didn't want that knowledge, and his mother never pushed him.

Oscar was never a breaker, but he liked feeling the pulse of the Elsewhere at his fingertips, liked the feeling of the fire that burned safely out of reach, self-contained and strong. So he hiked out into the dunes, away from the whispered fights, and he pressed his hands up against the skin of the world to feel it beat under his palms.

He was old enough to go hunting now. He declined in favor of chopping vegetables and repairing radios. At night, he hiked out into the dunes with his mother and helped her fold her stolen magic into knots, or he climbed the smooth palms of the oases and looked at the stars.

The last time he had come to the desert, he had spent weeks climbing the trees as his father looked on and his mother waited at the top. When he fell, his father would kiss his sand-burned skin, and his mother would descend and call him brave. He had spent his last night at the very top of a tree, waiting for his mother to find him and bring him down herself. (She had scolded, but he thought she was pleased. When they came down, his father had passed them both steaming mugs of honey-water.)

This time, the night before Oscar was due to leave, the skies cracked open with a storm. Oscar hid under a tarp with a handful of peers. They sang old stories together, and Oscar joined his voice as best he could to the soaring verses. (His mother was not a singer, not a storyteller; it was his lowlands father who had recited as many of the old songs as he could remember. It was enough. Oscar listened to the songs anew, drank in the stories of stars that fell in love, and roared to drown out the snap of thunder.)

* * *

In his fourth and final semester in the Academy's two-year program, Oscar received a new roommate.

Harvey Clair was a first-year and a sage. Rivertown natives knew him by his height and by his reticence, but Oscar had the benefit of knowing him through family and was subject to his tireless questions. Even so, Oscar was surprised when Harv asked, "How well do you know Evans?"

Soul Evans was a first-year like Harv and a heroic feats major like Oscar. "I share classes with him," Oscar said, which was true enough. He did not say that the Evans family was an old one, because Harv already knew that. He did not say that the older Evans brother had died a hero, because Harv knew that, too.

"I caught him in the stables," said Harv. "He was grooming the horses."

He delivered this statement with his customary detached curiosity. Heroic feats majors had no classes in the stables, and certainly no classes grooming horses. "Guidework," Oscar said, half to himself.

Harv snorted. "So beneath you hero-types, I know."

"Maybe his parents think so," said Oscar.

Harv considered that. "Your parents don't," he said. "You're still a hero."

"My parents know better," said Oscar. "I got to choose. Evans... might not be that lucky." Indeed, it gave new meaning to the way Evans kept away from his fellow hero majors. Soul walked past bullies and their victims, but he also flaunted his name about as much as Oscar did: not at all.

* * *

Oscar enrolled late to the Academy, late enough that none of the incoming freshmen recognized him without his real name to give them the hint. His features were enough like his mother's that none of his fellow students seemed to notice the resemblance to his father.

He wasn't able to fool the professors, but he liked to think that they graded him fairly all the same. (He suspected Professor Grey might not have, but Oscar was a heroic feats major, and Professor Grey was a sage professor, so Oscar never had any classes with the man.)

He hadn't thought much of the issue of roommates, and his father had accordingly given him a roommate who would graduate at the end of the semester. Hiroto Yuuki was a guide major: his first words to Oscar were, "I'll do your assignments if you give them to me the day you get them."

Oscar had stared at the man (a year younger, despite being a "second" year to Oscar's first). "No, thank you," he'd said, and for the rest of his Academy life he crafted study sheets for his fellow hero majors and freely lent money out to the combat specialists.

Some of the combat specs thought this meant he was a doormat. Oscar smiled and made sure they stopped going after the guides' pocket money. Like his grandmother in the desert, he accumulated favors and traded them for peace.

* * *

Oscar had spent the first twenty years of his life traveling. As a child, he went every other year to the desert where his mother's family moved between oases with the ebb and flow of time. When he was a little older, he went on expeditions with his father's mother, tagged along at her heels as she explored coastal marshes and desert temples. By his teenage years, he had learned to pitch tents in the rain, to clean and dry himself with charms, to climb all sorts of trees and to fall without breaking bones. Throughout his life, his mother would break open the world and they would go through the Elsewhere, where their bodies turned to fire encased in intent, but Oscar always preferred to keep his feet on solid ground and his body contained in skin.

Oscar spent twenty years traveling, but he always came home to Rivertown, and then he went to its Academy to learn how to be a hero.


	4. Chapter Three. Coffee Breaks.

Oscar collected his breakfast and sat carefully beside Harv, who was pecking half-heartedly at a fruit salad.

"What happened with the puzzle box yesterday?" he asked quietly, so that the nearby Thompsons wouldn't hear.

Harv cast an impatient look at Oscar. "There were instructions on the box that were only visible to seers," he explained. "Casper was able to follow them. Q.E.D., Casper's a seer."

Oscar lifted his eyes to the sky beyond the open ceiling. "Yes," he said patiently, "I did get that part. I meant, what was in the box? I'm assuming Professor Yumi was able to get it open?"

"Oh." Harv cleared his throat. "A scroll. I didn't recognize the seal, so it's probably not Eibon's, but the writing looks like old mountain script. Professor Yumi's holding onto it, if you want to take a look."

He did want to, but Professor Yumi was in the middle of maintaining her gun and was unwilling to leave the scroll unsupervised. (Oscar, who had seen more cut-throat expeditions, did not bother trying to dissuade her.) "I need to return it to Professor Montero anyway," she said. "You can ask him after dinner."

The outdoor team left soon after. Kim slept on. Harv packed his measuring instruments and finger-combed his ponytail into impatient spikes. Jack paced. Professor Montero asked the rest of them if they had any experience with architectural blueprints; Evans volunteered, and he and the professor fell into a conversation over the minutiae of reverse-engineering a floor plan. Oscar reorganized his pack once (he paused when he saw _Eyewitness accounts of mountain vigilantes_ tucked neatly beside his papers), and then he coaxed Kim out of her bedroll. Once Kim had grumbled her way through a cold breakfast, the six of them finally set off into the ruins to map the first floor.

Professor Montero led the way down a dark central corridor, brandishing a small lantern. Kim was silent at the professor's heels, but her sleepy sea-green eyes watched carefully when he pulled out powders and rods to disarm old defensive curses. Jack kept pace with them, hand on sword. Oscar and Harv walked behind the combat spec, juggling Harv's instruments between them. Evans brought up the rear, a tiny torchlight clamped in his teeth as he scrawled notes that bled ink over his fingers; Oscar kept his head half-turned to keep an eye on the hero major, who fell behind easily when distracted.

Things in the Darkness were scavengers and ambush predators. This meant that they were cowards, and also that they tried to pick off the loner in any group. With the way Evans dawdled, it was probably inevitable that he was the first to run into a Thing— or rather, that a Thing ran into him first. Loudly.

Evans heard the Thing scream, dropped his papers, and danced out of its way before it could hit him. It hissed at him. Evans reached for his sword. Harv grunted under the full weight of one of his instruments as Oscar dropped his end.

Oscar rushed in and sliced through one of the Thing's tendrils. It backed away, hissing. "All right?" he asked Evans, who efficiently sliced through the Thing. It vanished with a final, ear-piercing howl.

"Fine," said Evans. He glanced sadly down at his scattered notes, but did not sheath his sword or stoop to gather them. "Thanks."

"Stay on guard, Mr. Evans," said Professor Montero, then interrupted himself with a shout.

Kim had barreled into his side with enough force to send the professor reeling. The contrast between their builds, one dwarfed by the other, made for a comical sight that quickly became serious when another bigger Thing dropped down into the space where the professor had been.

Kim screamed— Oscar's heart leaped into his throat— Jack seized Kim's elbow and swung her out of the way of an amorphous claw. The tiny woman tripped into Harv, who finally dropped his instrument to catch her. Clanging brass echoed loudly through the corridor as the two backed toward Evans.

Oscar was already running past them, toward Jack. Together they hacked at the Thing until it dissolved into the air with a roar of anguish.

Jack emerged from the scuffle with freshly ripped sleeves. Oscar's bruised ribs were throbbing again. The team gathered their scattered possessions and then retreated to an alcove to take stock of their injuries.

In the alcove, Harv mournfully inspected his broken instrument. Oscar double-checked his ribs, which were unhappy but still only bruised. Kim eyed Evans's notes while the man dabbed ointment at Jack's arms. Professor Montero looked around and declared that it was time for a lunch break.

"There's so many Things here," Kim complained later, after Oscar had distributed leftovers from last night's dinner. "Can you Academy students clear them out, or will they keep popping up?"

"We'll have to," said Harv, but he looked unhappy about it. "This place is basically one giant nest. Why are they even here? This place has been deserted for centuries."

"Why wouldn't they be here?" asked Professor Montero. "A big, empty castle like this is kind of ideal, isn't it?"

"It's too isolated," said Jack. "There's nothing for the Things to eat, and they like to eat. Harv's right. They shouldn't be here."

"So there's something here for them to eat," said Evans.

Harv opened his mouth to fire back scorn, but his expression turned thoughtful. Jack filled in with a snort. "There is _now_ ," he said. "We're here, after all."

Professor Montero looked uncomfortable. "You kids are grim."

"It's the Academy life, sir," said Oscar. "Easier to make jokes than face the reality of our impending doom."

"You sound like a philosopher," said Kim. "And look, you've gone and broke Professor Montero."

"I'm not broken," said the professor, but he looked upset. "You are _children_."

"Soul is," said Jack, looking devilishly delighted. "He's _seventeen_."

"You're only a month older, Jack," said Evans, indignant.

"And I am eighteen," said Jack loftily. "A legal adult."

"And how old are you, Harv?" Kim asked sweetly.

Harv looked annoyed. "None of your business."

Professor Montero dropped his head into his hands. " _Children_ ," he groaned. He tilted his head toward Oscar. "But you're in your twenties, aren't you?"

"I entered the Academy relatively late, sir," said Oscar, smiling.

"Harv," Kim was crooning. "It's okay, we won't judge you. You're seventeen, too, aren't you? _Sixteen?_ "

Harv stood up and brushed crumbs from his lap. "We're done. Let's go."

They inched their way down the remainder of the corridor in peace. Evans's eyes lingered on the open doorways that branched off of their path, but Professor Montero led them straight through the hallway and to the sunlight at its end. They circled around the outer, roofless halls of the ruins until they reached the library.

The ceiling had survived in this room, but the windows were less successful. Glass shards sparkled in the limited sunlight. Rotting wood from ancient shelves lay in crumbling planks at their feet. Books had long since vanished to the worms of time. At the very back, a sturdy wooden door hung off its hinges like a corporeal ghost. Oscar felt a shiver run down his spine.

"Seb's work?" he asked quietly.

"Who else?" muttered Kim.

"Seb's work," Professor Montero confirmed wryly. "He at least let me break the protective wards before he tackled the door down." They stepped through the door and into the archive beyond.

This room was as full as the last had been empty, and even darker. Shelves radiated from the center of the room, where a pedestal stood untouched by time. Professor Montero nodded at it. "This was where we found the puzzle box."

Oscar was peering down one of the aisles. Jack said, "There are scrolls here."

"Intimidated?" muttered Evans.

"No, but I bet you are," Jack shot back.

Professor Montero cut them off before they could descend into a full argument. "Pair off," he instructed. "One fighter per group, please. Let's start from the left and alternate aisles."

Oscar wound up paired to Harv and quietly regretted not standing closer to Kim, who was already picking a fight with Jack. Their bickering was audible, if unintelligible, even from an aisle or two over.

"Why is she like that?" Harv muttered as he rooted around in his bag for a torchlight.

Oscar shrugged. "She just is."

Harv gave him a look as he handed over the torchlight. "As if you don't know."

"I _don't_ know," said Oscar, squinting around at the tiny labels. "I have guesses."

"What are your guesses, then?"

"None of your business," said Oscar cheerfully. He carefully tugged a scroll from its slot in the shelf.

" _Oscar._ "

Oscar tilted his head up to meet Harv's eyes. They'd known each other long enough for Oscar to remember when it had been the other way around. "You have secrets too, Harv," he said. "Don't judge her for keeping hers."

Harv tugged at his ponytail. "You _know_ my secrets," he grumbled. "You can at least say where she's from?"

"I don't have access to University files, Harv."

"She doesn't have desert blood, that's for sure," Harv continued. "Her skin tone matches the people here in the mountains."

"Her family could have moved."

"Obviously her family _did_ move," said Harv. "Recently. Not that I blame them, given the history of this region. Any mage siblings? Or is _she_ secretly a mage?"

"Harv," said Oscar, tired. "Let it go."

"You're curious, too."

"And I'm _waiting_."

"For what?"

"For her to tell me."

"Oh, yes. Bribery."

" _Kindness_ , Harv." Oscar sighed. "Leave her alone. That's all she really wants."

Harv snorted. "Yeah, right."

" _Harv._ "

"All right, all right."

They reconvened with the other four at the end of the room. Jack, Oscar, and Professor Montero were the only ones carrying scrolls. Jack had already unrolled one and was apparently reading it. (Kim was peering at it, too, but her eyes drifted too aimlessly for her to be reading.)

"You can read mountain script," Oscar said, remembering Jack's fumbling translation from the courtyard yesterday. Jack lifted his eyes from his scroll just long enough to glare. "I know you're not stupid, but you can at least let me be _surprised_ ," Oscar sighed. "Mountain script is old. I don't expect _anyone_ to know it, let alone an Academy student."

"You talk too much," said Jack.

The six of them tallied their finds and returned to the dining hall, where the outdoor team had already almost finished cooking dinner.

"What's this?" asked Oscar, hovering over a bowl of meat marinating in spiced oil.

"Quail jerky, to snack on later," Kilik told him. "Professor Yumi and the Thompsons shot some while we were exploring today." His lips quirked into a grin. "Casper got mad at them for scaring the wildlife."

"You didn't?"

"I was kind of mad, too," Kilik admitted. "Still, I like trying new food, and the animals will be there tomorrow."

After dinner, Professor Yumi returned the puzzle box to Professor Montero, and Oscar found himself standing next to Jack as they waited for Professor Montero to show them the scroll. (Harv, who had gotten a good look the night before and couldn't read mountain script anyway, was instead examining the pieces of his broken instruments.)

"Thank you, Azusa," Professor Montero was saying when Oscar caught a glimpse of the red wax pressed into the ancient paper.

"That's a desert seal," he blurted. Jack raised a brow. Oscar explained, "My gran— she's a cursebreaker. She's done a lot of research in the desert."

Professor Montero had turned back to them. He gave Oscar a knowing look, but did not name his grandmother. "What do you make of the script?" he asked instead, unrolling the scroll so that it faced them.

Oscar glanced over the characters. "They're still mountainous in origin, I think. A correspondent, maybe?" He looked at the seal again. Even with the puzzle box and countless layers of preservative spells, the wax had worn smooth over the centuries. "I'd have to check," he said slowly, "but I think that's the seal of Lord Anpu, from the era of Ra the Starson."

Jack squinted at the scroll. "Definitely mountain script. You're sure the seal is from the desert?"

Oscar hid a sigh. "Yes."

Jack considered that. "Can _you_ read mountain script?" he asked suddenly.

Oscar lifted a brow. "How do you think I picked those scrolls from the library?" he asked, unable to contain himself.

Jack stared. His eyes, Oscar noticed, were a soft brown.

"You two are the only students who can read mountain script," said Professor Montero. "You should collaborate. I'll oversee."

He sounded impatient. Oscar privately agreed with the sentiment. "I will," he said, and even to himself it sounded like a challenge. "I would be honored," he amended.

Jack was still staring. "Sure," he said abruptly.

They settled into a routine over the next few weeks. Oscar spent his first few minutes of wakefulness putting his bedroll away and slowly draining through his cleaning charms. He walked the five turns to the dining hall alone most mornings, though about once a week Jack would be up early enough to walk with.

By the time he reached the main hall, breakfast would be ready, courtesy of Casper, Kilik, and Harv. (Professor Montero guzzled his way through his and Oscar's stores of coffee within a week; he begrudgingly resorted to the local tea that Professor Yumi bought weekly.)

Kim woke up last except for when Seb did; she missed the outdoor team more often than not. Oscar cleaned the dishes, and then he sat with Jack with their stacks of old archive scrolls in peaceable silence. Evans reviewed his sketched floor plans; Professor Montero hovered nearby, unspeaking, until the weaker caffeine in the tea kicked in, and then he and Evans discussed the sketches together.

Harv was the least willing to put up with Kim's perpetual sleeping in. He spent his first few mornings finger-combing his hair into irritated spikes, and then he went to Professor Montero.

"We can't leave her behind, Mr. Clair," the professor said as Oscar and Jack arrived. "Wards or no, it would not be safe."

"She's holding us back," said Harv.

Oscar opened his mouth, but Jack beat him to it. "She knows what she's doing," he snapped. "Go talk to her— you might learn something."

"Learn what?" Harv scoffed. "How to be a lazy, whiny brat?"

"How to _respect people who don't live like you_ ," Jack spat. "Your thesis is on the effects of Elsewhere flux in machines, right? Kim's is related— she's looking into applications. I can't— wrap my head around all of it." He grimaced at his own admission. "Point is, don't sneak around behind her back without talking to her first."

Oscar gaped at Jack until he snapped, "Oh, shut your mouth, Ford," and stalked off to eat breakfast. Harv stared after him, too.

"He's got the right idea," said Professor Montero, clapping a large hand on Harv's shoulder. "You should talk it out with Miss Kim." He turned away and pointedly sipped his tea.

Oscar cleared his throat. Harv turned to him. His wide mouth was compressed into a long, thin line.

"It bothers you that much?" said Oscar.

Harv shrugged. "No one else is bothered," he spat, but he retreated to his bedroll before Oscar could say anything else.

Not that Oscar had anything to say.

That day, Harv dragged Kim into a whispered conversation in a freshly Thing-free scullery room where the indoor team spent their lunch break. Harv spoke to Kim more evenly and more often afterwards, his long spine bowing to bring his dark head closer to Kim's.

Kim remained a late-riser; Oscar and Jack traded Kim-waking duty. (Oscar tried not to think about the way Jack and Kim got along, other than to think that it was probably inevitable.) Harv spent his mornings pouring over papers written in a tiny, tidy hand.

Once a week, Professor Yumi took Evans to the nearest village to check in with the Bureau, but on most other days the indoor team went ruins-diving. Kim continued to watch the way Professor Montero disabled old protective curses; Harv, who was as quick to forgive as he was to judge, watched with her, his own instruments at hand. (One was battered but miraculously functional.) Oscar grew accustomed to having Jack fight beside him and Evans watch both their backs. (Professor Montero, who was a competent enough fighter on his own, was less competent at understanding how to fight in a group and therefore left the combat to the more trained.)

The outdoor team always had dinner started by the time the indoor team returned to the dining hall. Oscar slotted himself into the cooking process under Kilik's direction; Evans specialized in spiced rabbit buns; Patrick and Seb were banned from "helping" within a week, after they nearly set Casper on fire. (Sometimes, Professor Yumi brought snow cookies, a local delicacy.)

Dinners were loud and boisterous. Oscar and Kim were the only ones who could contain Patrick and Seb, and only because they liked their stories best. (Kim did not sing, but Oscar still thought of voices that soared over snapping thunder.)

Evans cleaned up after dinner. The rest of the team peeled off in twos and threes for self-study. Harv and Kim poured over their papers, black and pink heads bowed together. Casper and Kilik worked with Patric; mages Seb and Liz traded sparks as they tested the communication spell matrix they were developing. Oscar and Jack worked on the Anpu scroll from the puzzle box. Professor Montero sat nearby, sorting through his own library books and occasionally commenting on more difficult phrases.

Oscar, Jack, and Evans walked to their tents together at night, but only after Evans turned up with new Thing-inflicted scratches one morning. On evenings before sunset, Oscar and Jack could quibble over mountain script; otherwise the three of them walked in peaceable silence. (They ran into a Thing, once. Afterwards, Evans dragged them all into his tent. His face was smooth and unreadable as he cleaned their cuts and smeared ointments over their bruises. His tent was the biggest of the three, but drying herbs and parchment scraps and empty jars overflowed into his bedroll.)

* * *

Oscar arrived in the dining hall one morning to find Kilik huddled next to the fire, nursing a cup of numb tea, while Casper wrapped a blanket around the ailing mage. Professor Yumi was crouched beside them, grimly brewing more tea for the rest of the mages before the Elsewhere storm could hit her, too.

Someone, probably Casper, had set out a bowl of scavenged blueberries beside the last few scoops of yogurt. Oscar made himself a meager meal and installed himself next to the fire to take over tea-brewing duties.

"Thank you, Mr. Ford," said Professor Yumi. She sat carefully next to Kilik, who was half-asleep over his cup.

Seb dragged himself over a few minutes later, already suffering from the effects of the storm. (Oscar was disturbed: the mage had never looked so lifeless.) The Thompsons followed soon after. Liz didn't need to lean on her brother yet, but Patrick was already scowling with worry.

Jack dragged Kim out of bed relatively early that day. In retaliation, Kim slipped Jack a cup of numb tea, and the Academy student had to retire to his tent to sleep off the cottony side-effects.

"He was asking for it," Kim said to Oscar's sigh. When Oscar didn't reply, she pushed herself to her feet and grumbled, " _Fine,_ I'll go check on him." And she stomped out of the dining hall to catch up with Jack.

"How do you do that?" Casper asked after Kim had left.

"Do what?" said Oscar.

Casper nodded toward the end of the hall that Kim had disappeared through. " _That._ She listens to you, you know." He paused, then amended, "Well, as much as she listens to anyone."

Oscar shrugged. He didn't quite manage to keep a grin off his face. "I just let her do what she wants."

Casper shook his head. "No, she _listens_ to you." But he didn't push the question. Instead, he looked around at the mages. "We're not going to have enough for dinner without anyone hunting," he said.

"Patrick can hunt," said Oscar.

Casper blinked at him. "Oh." His black eyes flicked over to the younger Thompson. "If you can convince him to leave Liz, maybe."

Oscar followed the other student's gaze to where Patrick sat dozing beside his sister. "No, probably not."

Casper acknowledged the admission with a nod. "There's a village about two hours away..."

"The one Professor Yumi and Mr. Evans go to, you mean," said Professor Montero, who had been quietly administering numb tea while waiting for his morning caffeine to kick in. "Azusa—"

"I would be a liability," said Professor Yumi. She looked murderous even through her haze of numb tea. "Mr. Evans can go, I'm sure. With Mr. Grey, perhaps, if Mr. Evans gets a little turned around." She glanced at Casper, who shot a look at Oscar, his eyes wide and black. Oscar remembered the way his badge had looked on Casper's lapel, the weight of it in an untrained man's hand.

"I'll go," said Oscar. "I wanted to restock my supply of charms, anyway." He brushed his hands over the knots at his wrists. "Evans and I can fight, so we shouldn't have any trouble with bandits or Things. And we can take Harv, if we do need someone who can read a map. He's more used to danger, anyway, being an Academy student."

Casper nodded. "I'll lend him my maps."

Evans was nearby, scowling at his floor plans. He agreed to the trip easily enough, but not before shoving his sketches at Professor Montero. Harv was by his bedroll, scrawling notes over a neat research paper in messy chicken scratch. He grumbled, but he folded the papers away and tucked them with the rest of his research. "You have the maps?" he asked Casper, who nodded.

Oscar made a quick run to his tent to pick up some letters and met the other two at the entrance to the dining hall, and then the three of them set off. Outside a few abortive attempts at small talk, they made the journey in silence.

The village was in sight when Oscar said, "I miss having autos. We could have been here in a tenth the time."

Evans shot him a look, but didn't comment. Harv said, "There's a good reason why they're so rare up here."

"They haven't got the infrastructure, right?" said Oscar. "The roads are too narrow and too steep."

"That, too," Harv allowed, "but that's fixable with a little effort, and the economic benefits would easily sway local opinion. No, it's because all our generators run on Elsewhere potential, and the Elsewhere is notoriously unstable in this region. Geologists think there's probably a massive vein of Elsewhere cracks here somewhere, deep enough that nobody's found them yet, but close enough to interfere with the technology we have."

"Elsewhere cracks?" Evans repeated.

"Rocks," said Oscar. "They look like quartz, if quartz bled magic— er, the outdoor team could probably explain better than me."

" _I_ could explain better than you," said Harv, looking amused. "You know, being a sage and all. And the cracks don't _bleed magic_ —"

"I never said they _did_ , just that they _looked_ like they did—"

Evans cleared his throat. Oscar fell silent and let Harv start again. "You know how the Elsewhere sits next to our world?" the sage asked Evans, who nodded. "Interdimensional yadda yadda, mages work by being able to pull some of it through— like water dripping through a cloth, where mages are points of gravity pulling the water through— points of gravity that can control their weight—" Harv made a face. "Well, the analogy isn't perfect."

"Elsewhere cracks," Evans reminded.

"Right, those. They're what they sound like— rips in the fabric, cracks between our world and the Elsewhere— except that the magic flows _back_ , at least according to accounts from seers—" Harv made another face. "You know what, maybe forget the analogy."

"Cracks," Evans repeated. "Like, what— cracks in the _fabric of the world_?"

"That's what I said, yes— er, that's the theory, anyway."

Evans scowled. "Sounds dangerous."

Harv shrugged. "Not so much for non-mages."

"... And for mages?"

"You've seen what Elsewhere storms do to them," said Oscar quietly. "Cracks are worse."

Evans looked at him. "But our mages are fine," he said. "I mean, when there isn't an Elsewhere storm incapacitating them."

"They have to be pretty close to an Elsewhere crack for it to take effect," said Harv.

"How do you know?"

"I'm a sage," said Harv. "I know everything." But there was a dourness to his voice that didn't allow for many questions.

Evans looked torn between asking more and shutting up. Oscar took pity on his fellow hero. "Historically," he said carefully, "Elsewhere cracks have been used to capture mages for the slave trade."

"Not just historically," said Harv grimly. "This region isn't rich in much else— the Eibons mined it dry. Their techniques were enormously effective at the time, that's how they made their fortune, but coal doesn't exactly grow in caves."

Evans's scowl had deepened. "Mage slaving? _Not just historical?_ "

Harv ran a hand through his hair. "Mages do magic by pulling on their, er, gravity." He eyed Evans, who nodded understanding. "That gravity has an energy that can be exploited. There's a machine..." He grimaced, pressing his mouth into a flat, wide line. "This isn't a good place to talk about it."

By this time, they had reached the village. Oscar could almost sense the curiosity of its residents buzzing around them, though the village itself was quiet enough. He thought wryly that mountain villages weren't so different from desert tribes after all: everyone in them was still human, still curious, still a community reacting to a disturbance as one. Harv could blend in, but Evans's honeyed complexion and Oscar's dark skin betrayed them as foreigners.

Evans was still staring at Harv. Oscar came to his rescue again. "Many mountain villages relied on the machines," he explained quietly. "The hub of the trade collapsed a few decades ago, and the villages... suffered."

"Because they couldn't power the machines?" murmured Evans as he looked around the buildings. He nodded to himself, curtly. "So they tried to maintain the trade themselves."

"Don't pity them," said Harv, unforgiving. "They chose their own lives over strangers'."

"They're still here, selling their goods to travelers like us," said Evans. "That makes them and their machines convenient for us, too, doesn't it? Or are you going to burn this village down for making that choice?"

"There's no evidence that _this_ village has done anything wrong," said Oscar hastily.

Harv was looking at the buildings, too. His wide lips were pressed flat with disapproval. "The roofs," he said.

Oscar followed the sage's gaze. "What about them?" he asked.

"They're not very well maintained," said Evans. "Up here, so far up the mountains? I can already tell, they don't keep out the cold as well as they should. The machine... you said it provides energy? Enough to keep the houses warm?"

Harv stared up at the roofs.

"How long have they had the machines?" Evans continued quietly. "Do they know how to seal up their homes anymore? I've seen the reports— the Bureau has been working on covering damages, repairing old buildings, but their focus was on the most economically viable towns, the ones closer to the lowlands. A little village like this, tucked this far into the mountains—"

"They're killing people," said Harv.

" _Harv,_ " Oscar hissed.

Evans's voice went quieter. "They're trying to save themselves," he said, "the only way they know how."

Oscar looked at him sharply. "That doesn't make it okay," he said.

"No, it doesn't," said Evans. "I'll go get our messages. You two can pick up supplies. Meet you at the post office." He began to stalk off.

"Evans," said Oscar. " _Evans._ I have letters to send, Evans."

Evans wheeled around, snatched the waiting letters from Oscar's hand, and left without a word. His ears were bright red.

"Surely he doesn't sympathize," said Harv quietly.

Oscar, who had seen Evans walk past bullies and their guide victims and pretend they weren't there, said only, "Come on, I'm running low on charms."

The village market was a little thing that fit neatly into a single plaza. Oscar, used to the sprawl of the markets back in his hometown, kept glancing down empty alleys expecting merchant booths.

Harv stayed in the market and checked items off the grocery list in his pocket while Oscar tracked down a hedgewitch. When he knocked, the woman only let him in after he let her catch a glimpse of his blue-and-black badge.

"They're a friend's charms, right?" she said nervously as she pulled knotted ropes from a drawer. "Imported, right?"

Oscar watched drying herbs sway in the window and thought of Evans's cluttered tent. He turned back to the woman to press coins into her slender hands. "Of course, ma'am," he said. "You need them too, don't you? I hope I'm not buying too many."

"No, sir, never, sir," said the woman. "Thank you, sir."

"Thank _you,_ ma'am," he said. He tucked the knots into his pack instead of tying them around his wrists. "You wouldn't happen to have any fairflower extract, would you?"

Harv was loitering nearby, his arms overflowing with grocery bags, when Oscar stepped out of the little house. "Find everything?" asked Harv.

Oscar relieved Harv of some of his groceries. "Yeah. Picked up a present for Evans, even."

Harv peered down at Oscar. "What? _Why?_ "

"It's his birthday," said Oscar. "Don't worry, I'll say it's from you, too."

They found Evans at the post office. The hero waved a tiny salute to them from the little old telegraph booth. "Harv's here," he said into the receiver before offering it to Harv. "There's a very lost harpy in town that they want to wrangle back to the Academy," he explained.

Harv's brow furrowed. He passed his groceries to Oscar and shimmied into the booth past Evans. "Soul filled me in. Where's this harpy?"

Evans backed out of the booth. He leaned against the wall next to Oscar, sighed, and closed his eyes.

"Happy birthday," Oscar said.

Evans was silent for a moment. "You pay attention, Ford," he finally said.

"Not really," said Oscar, juggling groceries to get a vial out of his pocket. "Here."

Evans looked down but did not take it. "That's fairflower extract."

"You were running low," said Oscar. "Unless you had a stockpile that I didn't see, which if you're overflowing now, I'm sorry."

"No," said Evans. He finally took the vial. "Thanks," he said quietly as he tucked it into a satchel at his thigh.

"What, for the groceries?" said Oscar, peering around the little post office. "It's nothing. Did you pick up our letters?"

"Oh, yeah." Evans snuck an arm into the booth, dodging a flap from Harv's hand, and plucked up a parcel of letters from the top of the telegraph machine. "Here, these are yours."

Oscar flicked through them. Most were written in his father's neat hand. A handful had the official seal of the University. One he handed back to Evans. "This one's for you," he said.

Evans glanced at the sender. His ears went red. "Oh. Sorry."

"No, it's kind of funny," said Oscar. "I know an Albarn, too. He's a classmate." He passed the letter back. "Who's Maka?"

Evans hesitated, his thumb under the lip of the envelope.

"Unless it's none of my business," Oscar said.

Evans opened the letter slowly, neatly. "I went to the desert once," he finally said. "I mean, to the city. Because... Well, I went. We met. While I was there. And we kept in touch."

Oscar thought he knew what had taken the other man to the desert. "You lived there a while, didn't you?" he said.

Evans shrugged one shoulder. "Not that long," he replied. "A month or two, before I went to the Academy."

He was barely eighteen. It was the standard age for Academy students— the standard age for a graduating second-year heroic feats major— but Evans looked too young with that slouch in his shoulders. Unlike Harv, unlike Oscar's classmate Albarn, Evans did not stand tall, did not have a spine of steel unbowing.

Oscar had spent months on other expeditions. He knew how short they felt at the end, how many memories they somehow held. He knew without being told how precious two months could be.

"Not that long," he repeated, smiling. "That's about as long as we're supposed to spend up here, isn't it?"

Evans shrugged again. "Guess so."

Harv stepped out of the telegraph booth, still holding the receiver. "All done." He glanced between the two of them and replaced the receiver on its hook. "Let's head back."

"Did you just hang up on the Academy?" Evans asked.

"Is that a problem?" said Harv. "You checked in first thing so they know we're not dead, and anyway I just helped them, ah, _wrangle a harpy_ , so they can't be too mad at me. C'mon, let's go."

* * *

Around the summer solstice, the indoor team ran into several wards that no one could quite wrap their heads around, so Professor Montero asked Casper to swap teams for a few days. "At the very least you can help us get past it," the professor said hopefully.

Casper paused in the middle of blowing on his broth. "If you're certain," he said carefully, but he glanced at Kilik.

Kilik caught the look. "D'you think you could use a mage?" he said to Professor Montero. "I could feel around, throw up a shield if anything went wrong."

Professor Montero hesitated. "I don't want to take too many of you from Azusa," he said. "She'd get lonely."

"Terribly lonely," said Professor Yumi, looking as unimpressed as ever. "It would be nice to keep the numbers even, however. For safety."

"I'll go," Kim announced, drawing looks of surprise. "What? I want to look around a bit."

"I'll go, too," said Oscar. He exchanged a look with Jack, who had said the same thing at the same time.

"Two university students for two university students seems like a fair trade," said Professor Montero. "All things equal, I'd rather keep you around, Mr. Lantern. You work better with Mr. Evans."

Jack shot Evans an annoyed look. "Fine," he grumbled. To Oscar he hissed, "Keep her safe, Ford." Oscar lifted a brow at him and did not bother to reply.

Kilik caught him after dinner, when Oscar was having his regular chess match with Harv. "Me and Cas usually make lunch from whatever Professor Yumi and Patrick shoot, and what we scavenge," Kilik said. "Will you manage?"

Oscar mentally ran through a list of supplies. "We might be stuck with your jerky for tomorrow," he said wryly. "I'll see what I can cook up. Thanks for the warning."

He woke Kim earlier than usual the next morning, but he did it by wafting sugary snow cookies under her nose. (He hadn't forgotten her vengeful application of numb tea.)

"How old are these?" she demanded as she wolfed down the cookies.

"I asked Professor Yumi to pick up some more on her last trip to the village," said Oscar, smiling. "C'mon, the outdoor team's leaving soon."

Kim groaned. Nearby, Seb woke himself up with a particularly loud snore.

"We're in the middle of exploring a quarry," Professor Yumi told them as they left the ruins. "Miss Thompson believes that's where the majority of the construction material for the ruins came from."

"How far is it?" asked Oscar.

"Just under an hour's trip downmountain. It's quite steep, however. We take our time coming back up."

Kim groaned again. Professor Yumi frowned in her direction. "Do you have something to say, Miss Kim?"

"No, ma'am," Kim replied. Then unable to help herself, she continued, "They carried entire _slabs_ up the mountain? I guess it's not impossible, but the friezes in the building are enormous."

"We know they had powerful preservative spells," Oscar pointed out. "The scrolls from that archive are easily half a millennia old. They could have had transport spells of similar magnitude."

Seb interrupted. "It's doable," he said. "It'd take a heck of a lotta work, but it's not impossible."

"Even for mages from several centuries ago?" Kim pointed out.

Seb made a face. "I dunno, probably? Assuming the Eibons were as powerful as they are in your stories, sure." He sighed. "It's a shame no one's reverse-engineering those preservative spells, though."

"Why don't you?" asked Oscar.

"Been working on linked communications with Liz," said the mage. "We found some quartz the other day that we thought might be able to hold resonance frequencies." He held up a blocky crystal. "Our tests say they _should_ work, but only within a range of about two feet, so I haven't heard 'em work. Liz says she did, though."

"You'd hear it if you learned how to whisper," Liz said.

A gunshot crackled through the trees. Patrick emerged moments later, carrying a freshly deceased quail by its feet. "First," he declared, grinning. His bare teeth gleamed in the morning sun.

"You'll have to carry that around all day," Professor Yumi observed. "Kilik isn't here to clean it, either."

"If Liz summons some water, I can do it," said Oscar.

"If Sissy summons water, _I_ will do it," said Patrick. "Y'all can go ahead. We'll catch up."

They waited for Patrick to clean his catch anyway, so that Seb could keep working with Liz and Professor Yumi wouldn't stress over splitting the party. Once the bird was plucked and frozen and tucked into Patrick's pack, they set off again.

They made good time to the quarry, which was somehow even redder than the mountains around it. By noon, they had descended into the quarry proper and even explored one of the many tunnels nestled into its walls. (It ended in a cave-in. Professor Yumi hoped aloud that one of the other tunnels was in better shape.)

They stopped for lunch at the mouth of the tunnel they'd just explored. Professor Yumi was in the middle of a miniature geology lecture with Kim, who nodded along and only occasionally picked at particulars. Liz helped Oscar start a cooking fire, and then settled by to watch her brother spar with Seb, who spewed magic like a rogue dragon.

Kim was the one who saw the Thing first. Oscar, who had been gazing absently at her from across the fire and a boiling pot of water, saw her eyes snap to him and widen, and he threw himself forward just in time.

A shadowy claw came screeching into the space where he'd just been. Liz screamed. Oscar drew his sword and blocked a swiping tendril. The weight of it sent him skidding back several inches.

Gunfire cracked sharply in Oscar's ears. The Thing withdrew, hissing; then gold bloomed across Oscar's vision, and Liz was next to him, pushing a sheet of magic against the Thing. She had it pinned to the tunnel wall within seconds.

"You okay, sissy?" Patrick called.

"Peachy," Liz called back, panting. "Hurry up and shoot it."

Professor Yumi obliged. Her rifle boomed, cracking through both shield and Thing. Liz flinched and shook her stinging hands. The Thing had already disappeared.

Something thwacked against Oscar's leg, making him jump and raise his sword.

Kim was crouched by his feet. She swatted at his legs again. Her lips were pressed into a small, grim line.

Oscar wavered, lowered his sword, and finally noticed that he was on fire.

"Stop _moving_ ," Kim snapped as Oscar yelped and backed away from both her and the campfire. "And put your sword away before you cut someone's head off."

Oscar obeyed, sheathing his sword and willing himself still in spite of the flames still licking at his cloak-ends. Kim shuffled forward and smothered them.

"Good work taking care of the small fry," Seb declared, clapping a hand on Oscar's shoulder. "Leave some for me next time, won't you?"

"Keep up, Sebby," Patrick told him. He was peering into the pot over the somehow-untouched campfire. "Water's bubbling, by the way."

Oscar rushed to the gunman's side. (Behind him, Kim hissed at Seb for nearly stepping on her. He hissed right back, but he helped her to her feet.) "Thanks," he said. "Go, uh, spar with Seb some more?"

Patrick saluted. "Try not to set yourself on fire anymore, Ox," he said easily, trotting off.

"Ox?" Oscar spared the man's back a puzzled look as he poured a packet of powdered spice into the pot.

"That's your name, isn't it?" the gunman called back.

" _No,_ " said Oscar. "It's _Oscar_."

Patrick considered that. He finally shrugged and grinned. "Close enough, Ox-man."

Oscar bristled, but Patrick had moved out of talking range, and Oscar did not want him shouting his new nickname in Seb's earshot.

"You're angry," Kim observed.

Oscar sulked over his pot of curry-water. "Yes," he finally said.

"You're _never_ angry," said Kim.

Oscar looked at her, surprised. She smirked and wandered back to Professor Yumi, humming.

The team broke bread, literally, and supplemented the thin soup with some of Kilik's quail jerky. Seb wheedled a story out of Kim, "To make up for not having Kils and Cas for food;" she obliged, "But no story at dinner, and I get to pick this one." ("Cheap," Seb grumbled, but he and Pat listened raptly as Kim spoke of giants and their killers.)

After lunch, they poked around another two tunnels. Both were dead ends. Professor Yumi scowled more than usual at their luck. Kim stared intently at a pale streak in the red tunnel walls; but when Oscar sidled up beside her, curious, she moved away.

They made their way back to the ruins. Professor Yumi critiqued Seb's communication crystal, or rather, the spell matrices it held; the Thompsons picked off a handful of wildlife, to be cleaned and frozen and tucked in the brother's pack; Oscar found some wild root vegetables ("Daikon," Kim called them) and added them to his dinner plans.

The dining hall looked strangely empty without Kilik and Casper preparing a meal. Oscar shook off the feeling and got to work: curry, again, but thickened with breadcrumbs and textured with the daikon root and greens he'd collected on the way back. The result was a hearty, flavorful dish that made Oscar nostalgic for the sticky swamps of the far south.

The indoor team returned just as Oscar finished slicing the roots into translucent white slabs. Kilik sniffed at the stew. "Where'd you get the spices?" he asked, amazed.

"Been saving them," said Oscar. He tipped the daikon slices into the pot.

Kilik breathed deep. "You've gotta teach me how to make this."

Seb tried to sneak a sip of soup. Oscar mercilessly denied him— payback for his poor review of lunch. "Honestly?" said Oscar, grinning. "It's mostly the spices. How was the castle?"

* * *

Two weeks before the end of the expedition, Evans dragged the indoor team to a corridor on the basement floor that they'd already mapped. "This doesn't make sense," he said, opening one of his sketches. "Look— there should be a room here. Not a big one, but it should still _exist_."

"You're sure you've scaled it correctly?" Kim asked, tugging Evans's arm until he lowered it to let her get a better look.

Harv perched both arms on her head as he peered down at the plans himself. "If Soul's bringing it up," he said, ignoring her indignant sputtering, "you can bet he's measured it about ten times already."

Jack jabbed a knuckle into Harv's side. The sage curled away from the combat spec, freeing Kim from his weight.

"Rude," Harv wheezed.

"Be nice, you giant," Jack replied, leaning an arm on Evans's shoulder as he looked at the map, too. (Evans rolled his eyes and shrugged him off.)

Professor Montero, who had seen the sketch that morning, was already inspecting the wall in question. Oscar took a quick glance and then followed the professor.

After a moment, he found it.

"Here," he said. He held his hand over a sizable crack in the stonework. "There's a breeze here."

Professor Montero crouched and peered at it. "That's an unlocking mechanism," he declared. "Or a trap—"

A small hand reached into the opening. "I got this," said Kim.

A clunk. Oscar immediately readied his shield, his heart pounding in his ears. Two steps away, Jack did the same. Evans's papers fluttered to the floor as he followed suit.

Kim's face twisted up. Oscar's stomach dropped to his toes. There was a dull scraping noise, and then nothing.

Seconds crawled by in silence.

Professor Montero inhaled slowly, exhaled sharply. "Miss Kim," he finally said, "Are you _insane_?"

Kim looked up, startled. "Professor?"

"You're lucky you weren't hurt!" the professor roared, making everyone jump. Oscar thought of scattered maps and an angry, sad man screaming at a boy with eyes wide and black. "You're lucky no one was hurt! We hadn't even checked for traps— you could have lost an arm, Miss Kim, if not your life!"

Kim pulled her hand out of the opening. "I'm sorry," she said quietly.

"You're _sorry_!" said Professor Montero. "You'll _be_ sorry if you keep doing things like that!"

"Professor," said Oscar.

"You could have died, Miss Kim! Our entire team could have died!"

Kim was looking at the floor. Her jaw was clenched. "Professor," said Oscar.

"Do you understand what you did? Do you understand how you could have _killed us all_?"

"Professor," said Harv.

Professor Montero caught himself and looked at the sage, but Harv was looking at Kim. Did he see what Oscar saw? Did he see the way Kim was curling in on herself and her secrets, the way she withered with self-loathing? Did he remember the way Kim watched Professor Montero disable traps, how cautiously he had wielded his tools to disable one herself?

"I'm sorry," Kim told the floor. "I... I got excited."

The professor opened his mouth, incredulous. Oscar cut him off. "We're fine, professor," he said. "Maybe we were lucky, but you can't just scold Kim like a child. At the end of the day, we'll get more bruises fighting Things anyway."

Professor Montero shot him a look. "And you're fine with _dying_ because of Miss Kim, are you, Mr. Ford?" He sounded closer than ever to calling Oscar _loverboy_. Oscar admired his restraint.

"That won't happen," said Oscar firmly.

Jack put away his shield. "Kim would never," he agreed, half-laughing at some secret joke. Oscar glanced at him. The combat spec was smiling, but with none of his usual sneer. "Did you figure out what it was?" he asked Kim.

Kim shrugged. "A door, I think," she said. Oscar ached for her usual brashness. "I couldn't get it open."

"A secret room, like you said," Jack told Evans, who still had his shield half-raised. "Put that thing away, Soul, it's fine."

Evans looked reluctant, but he did as Jack said.

They did not try the door again. Evans brought them to several more corridors where his floor plans looked illogical, and Kim did not try any more of the hidden mechanisms they found, not even after Professor Montero declared them curse-free.

None of the mechanisms opened. Evans had cheered slightly at every new discovery, pleased to find his hunches correct, but Kim was still quiet, no matter how Jack or Oscar coaxed.

At dinner, Oscar did not tell tales of monsters and the people who killed them. He spoke instead of a man stolen from his friends, of how he befriended and rescued a lonely seer, of how he tried to keep his friends from burning the world for his sake. He spoke of a woman who walked through gold fire, who broke the boundaries of the world and stitched them back stronger, whose hands shook when she shot her first criminal.

They were the wrong stories to tell. He watched Kim curl in on herself, quiet and hateful, and wondered if he should have spoken of Giantkillers and Slayers and Pipers instead. He ached to hold her hand.

"Who were they?" Jack asked that evening as they sat together with the Anpu scroll.

Oscar carefully struck through a line of translation. "Who?"

Jack sighed impatiently. "The stolen man and his seer," he said. "The woman who walked through fire."

"Not _his_ seer," said Oscar. "She wasn't anyone's to own."

Jack waved a hand. "Who were they?" he repeated.

Oscar frowned at the phrase he'd just crossed out. "How did you translate _feng bao_ , again?"

"Tempest," said Jack. "Stop changing the subject."

"Stop asking," said Oscar. "It didn't help, anyway."

Jack rolled his eyes. "Of course it didn't," he said. "Kim hates when ordinary people try to be noble." But he dropped the question and didn't even comment on the way Oscar's eyes kept drifting to Kim and Harv.

Kim was still up when they left that evening, papers pouring from her hands. Half were covered in messy chicken scratch. Oscar thought she looked marginally happier and let her be.

He would regret that.

Oscar emerged from his tent the next morning to find the world dimmer, quieter, heavier. His weather-proofing wards had held, but the ground around his tent was still muddy, and the cobbled, cracked floors were slick and dark as he made his way to the dining hall, counting the sixty-four square columns on the way.

The sensations would remain with Oscar, after— the muffled sounds of his footsteps, the petrichor filling his lungs, the grey mist that softened the corners of the ruins. It had rained overnight.

He stepped into the dining hall to find extra bodies crowded around the firepit. "You're the Rangers," he blurted as he approached.

The nearest of the newcomers, a stocky, well-built man, turned toward him. A red-trimmed badge was pinned to his chest. "That we are. Maynard Johannesburg, at your service."

Oscar shook the man's hand, somewhat bemused. "Oscar Ford. Nice to meet you, sir."

"You heroes are always so polite," the combat specialist said. He lowered his voice. "At least you're not as terrified as the other one."

Oscar glanced over at Evans, whose face had indeed turned to smooth, unreadable stone. He hadn't yet combed his hair, which was probably for the better, considering how red his ears were.

He turned back to Maynard. "How did you come by us, m— ah, man? Should we be worried about bandits?"

Maynard's grin faltered. "You're sharp," he murmured. He considered Oscar carefully. "Not bandits, exactly. Slavers. We picked up a tip from the area and came looking." He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at the expedition's two professors, who were chatting with a tattooed man. "Sid figured we could swing by, regroup. Not often he gets a chance to see his school buddies."

Oscar inspected the man. "He went to the University?" he asked slowly, making note of the man's green badge.

"So I've heard," said Maynard. "That was before he went to the Academy." He delivered two hefty pats to Oscar's shoulder. "I'm keeping you from breakfast. Go on, fuel up."

Oscar stumbled toward the firepit, where Kilik pressed a plate of jammy rolls into his hands. "When'd they arrive?" he asked the taller man.

"Ran into them while foraging," Kilik said shortly.

Oscar looked at him, at how stiff and straight his spine was. It wasn't proud; it was the same defensive lift that his mother carried through arguments with his grandmother. "Did something happen?"

Kilik shrugged, which meant yes, but he didn't say anything more.

Oscar looked around. Evans had been caught up in conversation by a bald, sharp-nosed man with the purple badge of a mage. The professors were still talking to the guide, Sid. Harv was as excited as Oscar had ever seen, nodding with his particular restrained enthusiasm as the Rangers' sage stood beside him, so tall and stick-thin that Harv looked normal in comparison. Seb, who was on an early-morning kick, was chattering happily at the Rangers' hero, an aging silver-haired man who nevertheless looked as if he could hold his own in a fight with three more Sebs. Jack hadn't come in from the courtyard yet, nor had the Thompsons or Kim emerged from their bedrolls, but Oscar was struck by the quiet way that Bureau insignia decorated every badge and armband.

Oscar glanced back at Kilik, who was stabbing moodily at the fire. "Is Casper okay?" he asked.

Kilik looked up sharply. "You pay too much attention sometimes," he said, exasperated, thankful. "You shouldn't worry about him."

"Yet?"

Kilik made a noise halfway between frustrated and grateful. "Yet," he agreed. "Now go away and let me sulk before Jack comes and interrupts again."

Oscar sidled away and tried to put the conversation out of his mind. Harv helped by dragging him into a conversation with the sage.

Jack arrived. He didn't even get a chance to bother Kilik— he was too preoccupied with the Rangers' presence, and chatted happily (happily!) with Maynard the combat specialist. (Oscar excused himself from his conversation for long enough to press a fresh jammy roll into Jack's hand. Jack barely looked at him, too engrossed in his conversation with Maynard.)

The Thompsons were up soon after. Seb, overeager, challenged Patrick to a sparring match. Jack lost Maynard to this new source of entertainment; the older combat spec cheerfully adjusted Seb's haphazard stances into other, possibly _more_ haphazard stances. Liz, starry-eyed, took Seb's place beside the silver-haired hero.

At last, Professor Yumi wrangled the outdoor team out of the dining hall. (Seb and Patrick jointly wrangled a promise out of Maynard, who cheerfully agreed to stick around and teach them more combat tricks.) Oscar barely noticed: he and the sages were deep in conversation over chess tactics.

The sun was high when Harv looked around and said, "Where's Kim?"


	5. Chapter Four. What the Seeress Saw.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  _(art by[@azroazizah](https://azroazizah.tumblr.com/))_

Seers did not see the future. Allison was no exception— she mostly just saw the spidery shadow of death, the way it cracked and darkened the skin of the people around her. It had taken her most of her twenty-five years of life to learn what it meant. Before she had, she'd only known to be afraid of it, the same way she'd been scared of snakes in the woods.

Seers did not see the future, but they _did_ see magic. The world glowed with it, a golden pulse that made everything look more vivid. It clung to everything, but it clung most to mages, saturating them like an eighth color that only seers could see.

When Allison's daughter was born, her eyes were gold. Her father thought this made her a mage. Allison, tired with labor but still laughing, still in love, had set him right.

There would be many more things that Allison Diehl tried to set right. She wouldn't quite manage it. The guilt would plague her for her entire life.

* * *

As a child, Kimial loved gold— the color, yes, but the metal, too. She was happiest when she watched the way her father made magic.

Jack Diehl was not a mage, but he knew magic all the same. On the nights he came home flushed with laughter and luck and money, he pulled coins from his daughter's ears and nose and sleeves. To Kimial, her father's magic was better than any gold fire.

By the time Kimial was five, her father had stopped bringing laughter home. At night, if he came home at all, he came home tired and unsmiling.

When Kimial was six, her father took her to a gambling den. _My golden goose,_ he called her when his cards won coin that night. His laughter sang her to sleep like an old, forgotten lullaby.

She half-woke in his arms on the way home and peered up at his blurry, unsmiling mouth. She would remember the silence, but it wouldn't occur to her for a long time that his pockets did not clink with coins the way they should have.

She was asleep again when he tucked her into bed and kissed her forehead. She slept through her parents' whispers, desperate and unkind. When she woke that morning, he was gone.

 _A business trip,_ her mother said three days later, when Kimial asked where he'd gone. _It'll be okay, Kimi. He'll be home soon._

_When?_

_Soon._

Kimial counted the days her father was gone, stayed up late into the night to will him home. Every night she fell asleep was a failure; every night she stayed awake, her father was one night closer to home.

He returned in the middle of the night, and she rushed out to meet him. He picked her up unsmiling, but he pulled a gold coin from her ear and tucked her into bed with it.

* * *

_He'll be home soon,_ Allison Diehl had told her daughter. _He's on a slaving trip to pay off his debtors,_ she did not say. _Don't worry,_ she said to her daughter; but to herself alone, she promised, _I'll set him right. We'll pay off our debts the right way, the honest way, the way that won't weigh lives against ours._

* * *

Kimial was seven. Her father brought her daily to the cellar of the gambling den. In the winters, he bundled her up tight and hugged her close. Always, he asked which of the people sleeping in the cellars glowed gold. _So we can take them somewhere better,_ he told her once. _Somewhere where the machines keep the houses warm, so they can keep our houses warm._

Kimial was seven years old. She thought dreamily of pressing her nose against a window that would not freeze her little hands. She never thought her father would lie.

Kimial turned eight. One of the people in the cellar woke— a man, about her father's age, with long black hair that might have looked better tied back, but to Kimial it just looked greasy and unkempt. The man's golden aura was draining into a rock tied to his neck, but he struggled and shouted. Kimial's father shot a dart into the man's neck, right next to the rock that gobbled gold.

Kimial cried. _It's okay,_ her father said. _It's okay, it's just medicine. He's just sleeping._ He wiped her tears away and let her see the frenzwood darts, tried to let her hold them. _Sometimes they don't want to go,_ he explained. _That's why they have to._

Kimial turned nine. Her mother picked fights with her father, quiet arguments, desperate and unkind. Kimial ignored her, mostly, and then her father promised to take Kimial away.

It was supposed to be a business trip, a short week. Kimial pretended that it would be forever.

The day Kimial turned ten, her father was supposed to take her away. Her mother took her first.

* * *

Allison Diehl was a seer, too. She'd known what death looked like, had seen the way it wrapped around her little daughter, and she'd refused to let Kimial burn at the hands of a Bureau mage. The night before her husband's last slaving run, before what would have been Kimial's last, Allison took her daughter first.

* * *

Kim Lee was eleven years old, and the desert was trying to bake her alive. The air weighed hot and heavy in her lungs. She missed the crispness of fresh mountain air, missed even the way it cut into her throat every winter. She wondered if sand could cut the same way.

Half a year later, during her first desert storm, the sand crept through gaps in the apartment wards and into her porridge, turning it gritty. It did not cut her throat the way she'd imagined, but it wore at her teeth.

Kim was twelve. She stayed up nights remembering, hoping, dreaming that for every sunrise she saw after long nights, her father would be one night closer. Every auto that rumbled down the empty streets carried him home.

Kim was thirteen, and she knew she would never see her father again.

Kim was fourteen, and she blamed her mother. ( _Go to sleep, Kimi,_ her mother whispered. _I'm sorry. I had to. I couldn't bring him, Kimi. I tried._ )

Kim was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. She knew how the alleys of the desert city twisted and turned. Autos no longer carried her secret wish. She learned from school libraries how they worked, how the engines used energy charms to run the great vehicles. She discovered that she liked learning, like growing and changing and expanding beyond herself. She was almost an adult, almost able to understand who her father was and what he'd done, but with assembly diagrams and tools and screws at her fingers, she didn't have to.

* * *

In another world, Kim might have been a mage. In her darkest moments, Allison wondered how Jack would have loved her then, if he would have sold their daughter to pay his debts.

In her heart she knew better. If Kim had been a mage, Jack could have run. If Kim had been a mage— if Allison had let Jack believe that Kim was a mage— perhaps their family would have stayed together.

* * *

The day the letter arrived, Kim cut and bleached and colored her hair pink. She went home, slapped the envelope down on the kitchen table, and told her mother, "I'm going to the University."

Her mother glanced at the letter. "You changed your name," she said.

Kim lifted her chin. " _You_ changed my name. I picked another."

Her mother traced the ink with a long seamstress's finger. "So I shouldn't write," she said.

"Why would you?" asked Kim. "You don't know a Jill." She left her mother with the letter, fetched the pack she'd been preparing for weeks, months, years.

"Kimial."

Kim turned and found her mother standing in the doorway. "You can't stop me," said Kim. "I'm eighteen. I'm an _adult_."

"I know," her mother replied. She creased the envelope in her hands. "I'm proud of you."

She opened her arms like a question. Kim shouldered her pack and did not answer. (She would regret that, later. She would wonder what it would have cost her to show that kindness, what it cost her to deny it.)

"I'm sorry," her mother said. She dropped her arms. (Kim did not see the way she curled in on herself and her secrets, and did not care to see how she withered with self-loathing.) "I'm so sorry," she repeated. "I had to."

Kim knew this argument. "No, you didn't," she said. "You didn't have to lie to me. You could have brought dad, too."

"I couldn't," her mother said. "I tried, Kimi."

"You could have," said Kim, and watched the way her mother bowed her head like she believed it.

"He wouldn't," said her mother. Then she changed the script. "Even when I told him you would die, he wouldn't."

"I wouldn't have died," Kim said. "I— _he wouldn't let me_ ," she screamed. "He _loved me!_ "

"Of course he loved you!" said her mother. "He loved us! He— he wanted to protect us." She laughed. "He wanted to protect us. He wanted to do _everything_ , and he wanted to do it himself."

Kim looked at her mother, at the wetness in her eyes.

"He wanted me to be the seer," her mother said. "He wanted me to _help_. When I didn't, he took you instead. I'm sorry, Kimi, I'm so sorry."

* * *

The problem with Jack Diehl was that he loved his family too much and not enough. He would do anything to save his wife and child, to bring them even a chance at a better life, but he would not let them lift a finger to save themselves.

Allison mourned him. She could not pretend that he was a good man, but she knew better than anyone how hard he'd tried.

* * *

In the mountains, tales of heroes chased children around the schoolyards. Kim had known of vigilantes and Rangers since before she could walk.

She knew before she could walk that all those heroes had abandoned their village. She learned of them at their cruelest, of the bandits who killed humans as well as monsters, of the Bureau thugs who only catered to wealthy mountain lords. The Pied Piper, the Giantkiller, the Slayer had all ripped the warmth from their humble homes; the Rangers disdained to set foot there.

Then she met a man with a blue and black badge.

"Stop _smiling_ ," she told him. "Or are you a Cheshire monster?"

"Rivertown human," Oscar replied, easily, handing her a blueberry muffin. "Good morning, Kim." His badge was pinned neatly to his leather chestplate, under his traveling cloak.

"Most people care when they're called monsters, you know," she told him. "Just get mad already."

"Most people don't like monsters," he said. He did not get mad.

Kim eyed him skeptically. "And you do?"

He smiled. "I try," he said, as if it were a good thing. "I'm a hero, after all."

Kim stared. "Heroes slay monsters."

The man shook his head. "Heroes try to help," he said. "Sometimes that means killing. Sometimes it just means knowing when to fight and when to listen."

* * *

Allison wrote her daughter even after Kim moved into the University dorms. She sent them on the backs of old sewing invoices and addressed them like they were from her little mending business.

Kim kept the letters. She did not open them.

She would think of those letters in the months to come, would wonder at the cost of kindness, at the cost of spite. She would write, hands cramping through long nights, but never to her mother. Her words were hers alone.

* * *

"Why are you here?" a boy with a silver armband demanded in the corner of a decrepit scullery.

Kim wondered that, too, most days.

"You sleep in," the boy continued. "You're rude to everyone. You whine about everything. Why are you _here_?"

"None of your business, Clair," said Kim, glaring up at the boy who didn't need to know that she spent her nights by the firepit squinting at her papers, trying not to wake anyone up or set anything on fire.

"It's _everyone's_ business," Clair hissed. "You stress us all out— do you know what stress does? And you do it _intentionally_ — And we all need a shower, but it's not like we _have_ one closer than two hours away! And the mornings— You hold us back in the mornings for _hours_."

Kim lifted her chin. "You know what bottling stress does?" she shot back. "Liz is setting up a shower _because I brought it up._ We don't hunt or forage in the mornings— in fact, we're not in charge of any food. Daylight isn't any more or less convenient for us here in the ruins, since we need to use torches anyway. We have the time to sleep in and head out late, and coming back later keeps us out of the way of the cooks during dinner. We've never gone back _early_ because of me— we were out here past sundown just the other day. _So._ " She eyed a fluff of gold that curled faintly off his shoulder. "Settle down, birdbrain, and use that extra time in the mornings to work on your paper instead of taking out your impatience on _me_."

The boy stared at her. Kim imagined the gears grinding in his head and didn't bother to hide a smirk. If he hadn't been cornering her, she would have walked back to the indoor team then and there.

Finally, he tilted his head. "You major in Elsewhere applications, right?"

* * *

Kim couldn't see the future, but she could see the same spidery tendrils of death that her mother saw. Unlike her mother, she could read danger in curls of gold and shadow. With a little intelligence, she could work out where it was going, but she could never read where it came from, no matter how she tried, so she stopped trying.

Kim couldn't quite pin down when she started running away, but she knew she was good at it. It was one of the only things she was good for.

* * *

"Where are you going?"

Kim jumped. Her hand scraped painfully against a protruding slab of stone wall. "Ow! Oh, hullo, Jackie-boy." The name rolled off her tongue with friendly acidity.

Jackie glowed a faint gold in her peripheral vision. "That's me. Mind filling me in?"

Kim thought of the archive, of being surrounded by ancient scrolls, of her own whispering panic and a warm, slender hand wrapped around her wrist. "You don't need to know," she said, inspecting the torn skin on her knuckles. She shrugged and stuck it back into the wall. She'd been here just yesterday, when Professor Montero had towered over her, scolding like a terrified mother. He hadn't known that Kim could see danger.

"Humor me," said Jackie.

Kim pulled on the notch in the wall. The corridor groaned. Jackie froze.

Kim pulled harder, and an entire section of wall swung open with a rusty creak. Before Jackie could recover, Kim was in the newly opened wall and following the cracked stairs down.

"Wait!"

Kim ignored the combat specialist. Jackie caught up anyway, a shield half-raised on one arm, gold fire cradled in the other hand. The flickering light made it harder for Kim to see what she was looking for.

"You're going to hurt yourself," said Jackie. "You've _already_ hurt yourself."

Kim made a rude gesture with her scraped hand. "This is _your_ fault, Jackie."

Jackie snatched her wrist. "You're bleeding."

Kim shivered when Jackie pressed warm lips to her knuckles. She didn't pull away. "Put out that fire," she said instead. "I can't see properly with it flickering all over everything."

Jackie huffed and dropped Kim's hand. "And I can't see without it. I don't want to fall on my face."

"And _I_ don't want to set off a trap because I didn't _see_ it."

Jackie grumbled but put out the fire. "Why are we here, again?"

Kim chewed on her lip. " _I'm_ running away," she finally said. "Why are _you_ here?"

"I can't leave you _alone_ ," said Jackie, exasperated. "It wouldn't be right."

"Why? Because I'm a civilian?"

"Because you're a _person_ , and it's not safe here."

"I'm perfectly safe," said Kim. "Duck."

Jackie followed the direction just in time. "Thanks." A golden sigil hung over Jackie's head like a wire. Jackie stared right through it. "Magic?"

"Yes. Follow my footsteps— your feet are smaller than mine, so you shouldn't have a problem."

Jackie nodded. "You're scared of the Rangers, right? You saw something."

Kim froze. Jackie stumbled into her, but managed to catch them both before they could go tumbling down the stairs.

"So it _was_ the Rangers that scared you off," Jackie murmured, arms still wrapped around Kim. "Does this have anything to do with the way you tried to scare me off, back in the library archive?"

Kim tried to break out of Jackie's grip. "Let me go."

"You're a seer," Jackie mused. "You're scared of heroes and you think mages should be scared of _you_." Kim struggled harder and did not look at Jackie's face. "Did you grow up with slavers?"

Kim let out a bark of laughter.

"You left the mountains," said Jackie. "Slavers don't _do_ that."

"I wasn't a slaver," said Kim. It felt like a lie.

Jackie heaved a sigh and let her go. Kim rubbed her arms against the sudden chill and hurried down the steps. Jackie did not stop her.

Kim hurried safely down to the bottom of the steps. At the last step she skipped through an illusion rune and finally stopped to consider where she was going next. Behind her, Jackie spoke. " _Woah._ "

The corridor had turned earthen around them, changing abruptly from neat stonework to rough-cut tunnels. Jackie's head swiveled between the stairway they had come from and the tunnel they had arrived in. His eyes lingered on a pale streak in the red walls. Kim remembered belatedly that most people couldn't see the spellwork woven into the fake wall they'd just come out of.

"What are you still doing here?" Kim asked.

"Keeping you safe," said Jackie.

Kim glared at the combat spec. "Really, there's no need," she said. "Go ahead and fawn over your precious Rangers."

A shadow fell over them. Jackie startled, wobbled, and sank to the floor, cheeks draining. Too late, Kim noticed the way the gold flaked off Jackie's blanched cheeks, the way danger curled like snakes poised to strike.

A stranger towered over them. In his hand was a jagged crystal strung around a metal chain. It burned at Kim's nose, acrid and damp. Her father had described these crystals as beautiful, wounded things. To Kim, they looked like black holes.

"Well, well," said the stranger. "What have we here?"

* * *

Kim used to wish she dreamed more. What easy escapes, she'd thought. What a way to get away from her life for even a night.

Then the nightmares came:

Jackie, weak with pain, golden aura flickering as it swirled into the abyss of an Elsewhere crack. Oscar, who was not a mage, but sometimes dripped gold ichor anyway. Worst was Harv, enigmatic and sharp, his delicate hands stained with blood. Sometimes the blood was his, red like mountain dust— but sometimes it was Kim's spattered all up his bony arms and dripping down the knife in his hands, staining them the same dark magenta as her hair dye as it bled from her head.

* * *

Kim would think of her parents often in the months to come: of her father, who had loved her and used her, and of her mother, who had loved them both but could only save one.

She hadn't even known she was being saved.


	6. Chapter Five. The Coming Storm.

"Where's Kim?" asked Harv.

Maynard looked around. "Where's _Jack_?" he asked, just as the outdoor team clattered back into the dining hall.

Oscar took one look and jumped to his feet. The Rangers' hero moved past him just as quickly. "All right, there, son?" he asked Kilik, who had a shaky hand on Casper's shoulder.

"What happened?" Harv demanded, climbing to his feet beside Oscar.

"Mage slavers," said Casper, who was the least out of breath. "They had Elsewhere cracks."

That explained the state of the outdoor team, explained how everyone's face was pale and drawn. The only non-mages were Casper and Patrick— Oscar took a second glance at Patrick and put an asterisk on that thought.

The Rangers were already on their feet. "Split up," said the hero. "I'll take Flash and Dengu. Maynard, Sid, take your pick from the kids."

"I'm going," said Oscar.

"Me, too," said Harv.

"Mr. Clair—" said Professor Montero.

"You're a sage," said Maynard, one brow raised. Professor Montero looked relieved; Harv looked affronted. Both expressions were short-lived at Maynard's next declaration: "Yes, you can come."

" _Maynard_ —" Professor Montero started, aghast.

"If you're worried, come with us," said Sid.

"He's a civilian," Professor Yumi said.

"He knows how to fight," Sid shot back.

"The outdoor team—" said Professor Montero.

"Soul," said the Rangers' hero. Evans startled. "Stay with the mages," the older man said.

Evans was already helping Seb sit by the fireplace. He looked relieved, but he swept his eyes over the outdoor team with something like determination. "Yes, sir." He met Oscar's gaze. "Good luck."

"Hang on," rasped Seb, rummaging through his pocket. He glanced at Liz, who nodded and pulled a quartz block from her satchel.

"Our research," said Liz. "Controlled communications. Phones, wired to each other, instead of to a network." She handed her block to the Rangers' hero, who was closest to her. Seb passed his to Harv.

"Thank you," said Maynard.

"Where's Kim and Lantern?" Professor Yumi asked suddenly. She turned her sharp gaze onto Oscar.

"We don't know," Oscar said.

Professor Yumi's lips were pressed flat. "I see." She looked at Harv. "You need a weapon."

Sid lent Harv a spear. They made their way out of the ruins, past the overgrown courtyard. The Rangers' mage collapsed the moat behind them. Clouds hung heavy overhead, threatening another storm.

Half of the Rangers peeled off. Oscar did not watch them go.

* * *

They found the slavers' tracks several hours later, near the quarry, and called the rest of the Rangers through the communication crystals as they followed the tracks back to the slaving camp. Oscar recognized Kim's bootprints, sunk deeper than the strangers', next to dragging steps that might have been Jack's.

Sid stopped them some distance away from the camp. They hunkered down to wait for the other three Rangers to find them. Harv finger-combed his ponytail into impatient spikes. Maynard the combat specialist paced. Professor Montero fell into a whispered conversation with Sid the guide. Oscar watched the darkening sky and thought to himself, _there are things here for the Things to eat._

The other Rangers arrived. The eight of them fanned out and surrounded the slaving camp.

The sharp-nosed mage shaped a barrier spell. He moved first, boxing himself, Jack, and Kim away from the rest of the camp. The rest of them disarmed and hobbled the four slavers. (Harv, wielding his borrowed spear, managed to slice a calf open and send the man writhing to the ground. Sid helped him pin the slaver down and tie him up.)

The scuffle was over quickly. They had a longer debate over how to handle the Elsewhere crack tied to Jack's neck, until at last Harv picked the lock and stuffed the cracked crystal into his pocket.

"All right?" Maynard asked the other combat spec tersely. Jack nodded. Color was already returning to his cheeks.

"I'll be fine," Jack grumbled. "I'm not that strong a mage in the first place." But he shot a wary look at Harv's pocket.

"We're taking this lot to the town downmountain," the Rangers' hero said, gesturing to the slavers. "Maynard, Sid, you'll help Mr. Montero and his students back to the ruins?"

"Will do, Sarge," Sid agreed.

Jack stayed close to Maynard as they led the climb back to the ruins. Sid and Professor Montero followed in stony silence. Harv tried to keep himself and the Elsewhere crack in his pocket away from Jack. Oscar turned to Kim.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

Kim shrugged, a tiny, lifeless motion. "Fine."

Harv, behind them, said critically, "You don't look fine."

Kim shrugged again. "Jack's fine, and he's the actual mage."

"Jack's an Academy student," said Oscar.

"Elsewhere cracks don't have a long-lasting effect," said Harv at the same time.

Jack appeared as if summoned. "Oscar, Harv. Can I have a moment with Kim?"

Oscar glanced back at Harv, who had slowed to keep his distance. When Jack slowed as well, Harv walked cautiously around Kim's other side. He and Oscar sped up slightly, leaving Jack and Kim at the back of their straggling group. Awkward shuffle complete, Harv said to Oscar, "What did you mean about Jack being an Academy student?"

"He's tough," said Oscar. "He knows the risks, or at least he's been jaded to them. Kim hasn't."

Ahead of them, Sid and Maynard were in low, quick conversation. Professor Montero was hovering behind them, uncertain.

"I'm an Academy student, too," said Harv. "I'm still shaking. No one's asked _me_ how I'm doing. Sid patched the man up and told me _Good job_."

Oscar looked up at the younger man, at the tense lines on his face. Harv was so much taller than he used to be, but he was still only sixteen. "You're a sage," said Oscar, as kindly as he knew how. "You never wanted to be a hero. And... the man was a slaver."

"I know that," Harv snapped. "I took Trauma and Cohesion, too."

"Really? I couldn't tell." Oscar sighed. "Kim can't take care of herself the way we can."

"Can't she?" said Harv. "She takes care of herself just fine in all those arguments she picks. Oh, but you've never argued with her."

"She's clever, and she's _smart_ ," said Oscar, watching as Sid finally seemed to make up his mind. "I don't have to fight her to know that. And that doesn't mean she knows how to handle trauma. Something the matter, sir?"

Sid glanced at them as he brushed past on his way to Kim and Jack. "No, I hope not."

Maynard seemed to be explaining something to Professor Montero, who looked troubled. Oscar exchanged a glance with Harv, who sped to the front while Oscar followed Sid to the back.

"Jack," said Sid as Oscar arrived. "Jack Diehl."

Kim's eyes lit up. For a shining instant, she was happier than Oscar had ever seen (but she had Jack right beside her, so why had she gotten so excited?)— and then her face went impossibly pale.

"You know him," said Sid.

Kim looked at Jack. Wordlessly, he grabbed her hand and ran off the trail and into the woods.

Sid gave a shout and took off after them. Oscar followed. "What did you say?" he demanded of the guide.

"Her father's a slaver," said Sid grimly. "They were separated when she was young. He wanted to see her again." He gestured at the flashes of pink that they could still see through the trees. "Looks like the feeling was mutual."

Oscar felt his face turn to smooth, unreadable stone. _She's had almost two months to run off,_ he did not say. _She's not so stupid as to do it with you Rangers around to catch her._ He wondered with fresh suspicion what they had said to Casper when they had run into him and Kilik.

The sun was setting sickly yellow. Oscar followed Sid through the trees until the older man ground to a halt. "They went up a tree," the Ranger said, astonished. He peered up through the dark branches. "Jack? Miss Diehl?"

"Her name is Kim," Oscar said.

Sid looked at him, then back up. "Miss Kim?" he called.

A wind swept through the trees. The rustling hid any signs of human life. Oscar thought of smooth palm trees and wondered if the rough bark of the deciduous trees made them easier to climb, or just more painful. He saw with new eyes how closely their branches grew.

"They're gone," said Oscar. "They must have jumped from tree to tree, like squirrels."

Sid looked frustrated. "They can't have gone _far_ ," he pointed out, but added in a grumble, "but they didn't _have_ to— just far enough to lose me."

"Sid." Maynard had caught up. "Where are the girls?" He sent a belated glance at Oscar, who kept his face stone.

"I lost them," the guide admitted. "They went up a tree."

"Why do all Jacks act like squirrels," Maynard grumbled. "Sh— He's not even from the forest."

Thunder rumbled. Oscar looked up again, this time trying to catch a glimpse of sky through the canopy. "They'll come back," he said. "They have to, with this weather."

They retraced their steps until they found Harv crouched, hood up, like a bird under frost. He peered up at them from under his hood. "Where's Professor Montero?" he asked.

The Rangers exchanged a look.

The four of them spent another hour looking for the missing professor. They found no sign of him, only the mysterious twin tracks of an auto, which meandered down improbably steep slopes. Without other leads, they followed it long enough to find two sets of bootprints and a third set of footprints from the auto's driver.

"Jack and Kim were here," Oscar murmured to Harv, "but who's brought an auto all the way up to this part of the mountains?"

A light sprinkle settled in, muddying the ground and threatening more rain. Professor Montero was still nowhere to be found. Tired, dispirited, they made the trek back to the ruins.

* * *

The Thompson-Black communicator pinged early the next morning, before even Casper or Kilik had risen for the day. Oscar, unable to sleep and unwilling to be in the courtyard where Jack's tent stood empty, had spent a restless night nodding over his papers at the firepit, trying not to wake anyone or set anything on fire. Evans and Seb had stayed up as well, but both were curled up nearby under blankets loaned from Kilik.

The voice that pinged over the communicator was a stranger's. The foreign tones jolted Oscar into wakefulness; then he recognized the voice as one of the Rangers'.

"Sid," the voice said.

The guide stirred from his seat across the firepit. "Here, Sarge."

With the name, Oscar was able to identify the voice as that of the Rangers' hero. "News from Law," the hero said. "Said you'd misplaced two of the expedition."

Sid eyed Oscar for a moment before he replied. "Yes, sir. They ran away. We found their tracks near an auto, later."

"I see." The hero's voice was uncritical. "The auto was Law's. He found them. Said he was taking them in."

"He can't arrest them," Oscar blurted. His throat rasped uncomfortably with disuse. He found himself wishing for warm honey-water as he cleared his throat. "They haven't done anything wrong."

"Who is this?"

"Oscar Ford, sir. The Academy graduate."

Sarge sighed. Over the communicator, it sounded like a rasp of sandpaper. "Right, well. They haven't been arrested."

"What did you mean by 'taking them in?'" asked Harv.

Oscar leapt to his feet, his heart pounding in his throat. The sage had been completely silent in his approach. Even Sid, who had seen him coming, startled.

Sarge didn't seem to notice, but he also wasn't physically present. He said only," They've been recruited."

"Recruited," repeated Oscar.

"By the law?" murmured Harv.

"By Inspector Justin Law, of the Bureau's Research and Development branch." Sid's expression was dark.

"Self-righteous little prick," another voice grumbled from behind Oscar. He glanced at the newcomer, the hair on his neck prickling.

"May," said Sarge.

Maynard's mouth twisted. He met Oscar's eyes and said deliberately, "Inspector Law is a good man. Your friends will be safe with him."

Oscar considered the words, considered the way the Ranger did not blink. "I see," he said. Harv stayed silent.

"Your expedition is in its final stages," said Sarge. "Focus on that. Leave the mountains, quickly. As I hope you've noticed by now, it's dangerous here, especially with the density of mages you have."

Oscar glanced at Seb, still curled by the fire, and then at the stone dining table behind him, where the rest of the team still slept. "I understand, sir," Oscar said aloud. He looked at Harv, whose eyes were even narrower than usual. "I don't suppose you've heard anything about Professor Montero?"

"Joe? What happened to him?"

"Disappeared while we were tracking the students," said Sid. He hesitated before continuing, "He knows better than to get himself lost in the middle of a high-stress situation. He wouldn't still be gone if he had a choice. I think he's dead, Sarge."


	7. Chapter Six. Obituaries I.

Joe Montero, a cursebreaking professor from the desert University. His first love had been a girl with soft golden curls and sparking gold hands. Sid had introduced them when Joe had visited him at the Academy.

They'd kept in touch via letters. Joe had read the longing in them and decided that she would be better off with someone closer than he was. He broke her heart with that decision. He'd regretted it ever since.

She'd been from the mountains and remembered them fondly. He had thought, abstractly, that he might be able to write to her again after the Eibon expedition, that she might listen to him again if he brought her news.

Instead, Azusa carried his death for years. She did not dare drop it for fear of her own tears.

* * *

Lucius Morby, father of two. His village was poor and powerless, so he and three others took up slaving to provide heat to the village during the cold mountain winters. Sometimes, after he'd caught and delivered a child mage, he would lie awake and wonder. Most of the time, he'd think of his children and tell himself it was better to keep them warm.

Lucius would die in a jail cell from an infected leg wound. He would never learn the name of the sage who inflicted the wound.

* * *

Ryuuichi Kuroko, the driver of the wagon that Professor Yumi's league stumbled upon the day the expedition arrived at the ruins. Ryuu hadn't expected Things to come screaming down upon him during the daytime. At the pace he was driving, he would have made it to his destination an hour before sundown, well before Things usually stalked the mountain paths.

He had separated from his wife a year prior and had been saving coin for a move upmountain ever since. He had made several trips already, had commissioned a little hut in the village where the Eibon expedition made their supply runs. The wagon he drove carried that last and the bulkiest of his possessions.

His little hut would stand empty for a month before becoming a mage-slaving den.

* * *

Evelyn Halsing, a hedgewitch who had sold cleaning charms to her village and, sometimes, to strangers with blue-and-black badges. The week after Oscar had given her coin, the slavers had come and taken her away.

* * *

Spirit Albarn, father of Maka Albarn, who Oscar knew as Max. (She had applied to the University multiple times with her birth name before applying as a man in a fit of indignant fury. As Max Albarn, she was the top of her class for every test but one, when Oscar had outscored her. The incident had sparked their rivalry.)

Spirit had been from the Forest. When he'd first left, he'd missed the close shade of the trees, had felt small under the open sky and sprawling stars. His wife had been a wanderer, had stolen him fey-like from the towering oak trees he'd been raised under.

He'd followed her to the lowlands, the mountains, the coast. When they arrived at the edge of the desert, she delivered a daughter. For little Maka's sake, Spirit put his foot down, put his roots down. Like a sprawling mesquite, he grew tall, grew broad, and gave shade to his daughter.

(His wife tried to stay, but in her bones she was a wanderer. She left when Maka was thirteen, and looked back only to send postcards. She meant to visit, but the world was too vast and her feet too restless. She would not hear of her husband's death for years.)

Spirit had loved nothing more than his daughter. He tied pigtails into her hair each day and read storybooks to her each night, right up until she moved into the University dorms. He sobbed for a week after he waved her goodbye, but he did not let the tears blotch the letters he sent her.

On the day Maka received her acceptance to the Eibon team, she received a letter from her father's landlord, too. It had been weeks since her father's last letter. She arranged her leave of absence from the University, and then she tied pigtails into her boy-short hair and went home.

In the desert, they burn their bodies and fill the sky with their mourning for miles. In the cities at the desert's edge, they forgo the mourning lest their days be endlessly black.

Maka wasn't able to stop the landlord from submitting her father's body to the coroners. She tightened the pigtails in her slow-growing hair, wrote her mother for the first time in her life, and took her father's ashes back to the Forest he'd come from.


	8. Chapter Seven. Rain, and What Comes After.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warning: Seb drops an f-bomb in the second-to-last paragraph. Thank you, Seb, for single-handedly doing this to my otherwise entirely G story. (:

The Rangers left as suddenly as they had come. Professor Yumi wrote a letter to the University to inform them that Professor Montero was missing. (She wrote another letter to one of her classmates, a mage from the mountains with soft golden curls, but did not send it.)

Summer was fast leaking from the mountains. Oak leaves yellowed and threatened to fall. Mornings grew colder.

Oscar and Evans dogged Seb's steps for heating charms to keep their tents warm. Seb moved into Evans's cluttered tent, "In payment for my services," but Oscar wondered if perhaps the mage had realized how lonely Evans had become without Jack's constant ribbing.

The Thompsons moved into Jack's deserted tent. When Oscar tried to protest, Pat had fixed him with a glare. "I'm Jack's roommate," he said fiercely. "If anyone here has a right to it, I do. And," he added, catching Oscar's glance at Liz, "I say my sister comes with me." (The evening after the siblings moved in, Pat shoved his way into Oscar's tent to hand him a stack of papers. "Jack's research," said the gunman. "The stuff with the scroll, at least.")

Harv caught a cough. Evans and Kilik traded off brewing wood-ear soup to pour down the sage's throat. When the cough worsened into a cold in spite of the cooks' best efforts, Oscar volunteered his tent for its charmed warmth and moved himself out to the dining hall.

Kilik, Casper, and Professor Yumi were all early risers. Oscar slept poorly even with Seb's charms heating his bedroll, so he got up with them and even helped Kilik and Casper forage. (They kept his basket separate from theirs, just in case he confused a nightshade for a blueberry.)

With half of them gone, the indoor team was disallowed from exploring the ruins more than they already had. Oscar, left with twice as many research notes to sort through, didn't mind the change as much as he might have. Evans and Harv borrowed Casper and Kilik during their free time to hunt through the places they'd already been. They found a secret, opened corridor within the week— and Kim's and Jack's footprints in its dusty interior.

The morning after Evans reported the find, Oscar dropped by Professor Yumi's bedroll. "It's been an honor working with you," he told her.

The professor gave him an odd look. "We have a week left," she said, "and another week or so after that to make our way out of the mountains."

Oscar shook his head. "Just the week," he said. "I wanted to let you know before we packed up. I've been thinking that I'd like to see more of the mountains— Challenge," he added when the professor looked as if she would protest. "The Merry Men's forest," he continued. "Perhaps Gravestown— I've heard the Bureau has been spending a lot of resources there."

Professor Yumi watched him carefully. "I see," she said. She adjusted her glasses before she spoke again. "You'll have to let your University know."

"I have a letter to send the next time I reach a post office," Oscar replied.

Professor Yumi nodded. "Were you aware that your classmates, Mr. Rung and Mr. Grey, also intended to stay in the mountains?"

"No," said Oscar, surprised. "I'll talk to them."

"Please do. And, Mr. Ford?" she added as he turned away. "Good luck. Be safe."

"Yes, ma'am," said Oscar.

He managed to catch up with Casper and Kilik before they'd left the ruins to forage that morning. The sun was still peeking over the horizon.

"I heard you two were staying," said Oscar without preamble. "I am, too."

Kilik stifled a wry laugh. Casper didn't bother. "Harv was right," the seer explained. "He told us you would last night."

Oscar felt his brows lift. "I didn't tell him anything," he said.

"He's staying, too," said Kilik. "Harv, I mean."

"He is?" Oscar repeated dumbly. " _Why_?"

Kilik and Casper exchanged a look. "Something about a generator," said Kilik. "He might tell you, if you ask."

Oscar considered that as they worked their way through a batch of wood-ear. "Where will you two go?" he finally asked.

"I have a cousin," said Kilik. "She lives in the same village as— have you heard of the Pied Piper?"

" _Have I?_ " Oscar blurted. "He was a legend, you know." He hesitated, did not say, _My mother still tells his stories._

"That's the village my cousin's from," said Kilik. He glanced at Casper. "I wanted to see her before I left."

Oscar glanced at Casper as well, but the man's lips were pressed carefully flat. Oscar was reminded abruptly of one of his parents' old friends. "I see," he said. "I think I have family there, too, but I've never visited. Should we go together?"

"The more, the merrier," said Kilik. "Harv is coming with us, too."

"The generator," Oscar agreed.

"A Jones-Grey generator," Harv said later over a lunch of leftovers. He and Oscar had elected to stay in the dining hall for the day while the rest of the expedition investigated the quarry. "They can replace the old Graves machines— the ones that create the demands for mages."

Oscar watched the sage carefully as he chewed through a bite of his reheated rabbit bun. "Do you think you can build them?"

Harv shrugged. "Never seen one, so I don't know." Regret flashed across his face. "Did you know Professor Grey was one of its inventors? I kept meaning to ask, but it's hard to remember in class when he's rambling on about the differences in import regulations between the coastal cities and the forest hubs."

Oscar snorted. "I'll have to remember that trick the next time I don't want to answer one of your questions. How long have you known Grey, anyway?"

"Not as long as you," Harv grumbled, sipping at his prescribed wood-ear broth. "And not directly. Miz Sez never introduced us." He took a bite of his bun. "You're staying to look for Kim, aren't you?"

"And Jack," said Oscar.

Harv rolled his eyes. "Sure, but mostly Kim. At least Jack's not a civilian."

"Doesn't mean he doesn't need help," Oscar pointed out. "Why are you asking?"

Harv took another sip of his soup. "I've got... sources," said Harv.

" _Here?_ " asked Oscar. "In the mountains?"

"Yes, _here_ ," Harv snapped. He ran his free hand through his ponytail, which had grown longer since they'd arrived. "They don't like getting involved, they're not really that powerful, but they're good at listening." He met Oscar's eyes. "They know things."

"About Kim," said Oscar.

"And Jack," said Harv, grinning wide. "Good to know where your priorities lie."

"They're together," said Oscar.

"They're together," Harv confirmed.

The rest of the expedition returned in a few hours, this time with more news of how Kim had left the ruins the day the Rangers arrived. "A hidden entrance in a tunnel," Evans explained as he set a pot of water to boil. "Apparently you'd been there, Oscar, on the day we swapped team members."

"I remember that," said Oscar. "There were Things in those tunnels."

Evans nodded. "Casper saw the entrance," he continued. "I'm pretty sure it connects up to the secret stairway we found."

Oscar nodded. Suspicion bloomed in a corner of his mind. He carefully did not acknowledge it. "Your pot is boiling," he said instead, and retreated to where Kilik was drying out strips of quail meat for his latest batch of jerky.

The day before they left the ruins, it rained again, a cold, miserable drizzle. Liz, romantic, said, "It doesn't want us to leave." Oscar, who had not moved back into his warm tent since volunteering it to Harv, said, "It's kicking us out."

The expedition spent the day packing and writing up their papers. Oscar was in the middle of Jack's notes when Patrick approached him.

"You're going to look for Jack and Kim," the gunman stated. He scrubbed a hand through his hair. It had been cut close to his head when they'd arrived, but it had grown long around his round face. "Sissy didn't want to tell you. _I_ don't want to tell you, it's not your business, but—" He interrupted himself with an impatient huff. "I don't want you to find Kim and leave Jack behind," he finally finished.

"I wouldn't do that," said Oscar, wounded.

Pat waved a hand. "Of course not, you're not cruel. But if you didn't recognize her, then you might not realize." He met Oscar's gaze with fierce, pale eyes. "Jack's a girl."

Oscar considered that. "I thought he might be," he admitted after a moment. "Er, she."

Pat blinked. "Oh. Well, good for you. _How?_ "

Oscar shrugged. "I don't think anyone else knows," he offered, apologetic.

"Of course not," Pat muttered. "You pay too much attention." He eyed Oscar suspiciously. "You know that's kind of creepy?"

Oscar blinked at the gunman. "What?"

"Nothin'," Pat grumbled. He pushed himself to his feet. "Been good workin' with you, I guess."

Oscar shook Pat's offered hand. He watched the other man stumble off and tried not to feel strange about being creepy. (At least that explained why Evans didn't like talking to him.)

The next morning dawned cold and clear. Oscar retrieved his tent and Harv from the courtyard, and then they settled into their last meal at the Eibon ruins.

"I'm going to miss these," Harv admitted to Oscar through a bite of Evans's rabbit bun.

"I'm keeping some as leftovers, you know," Oscar told him.

"You mean you learned how to make them," said Harv. Oscar grinned sheepishly and didn't reply.

They left the ruins with the homebound expedition. When they reached the fork in the road, Seb blurted, "Are you telling me I'm the only one going back to the University?"

Oscar winced. "Yes?"

Seb looked hurt. "And you didn't _tell me_?" He looked around at the rest of the team, none of whom looked surprised. "What— how'd the rest of you know?"

"It was kind of obvious," said Liz.

Seb swelled to his full height. "Take me with you," he demanded.

Evans put a hand on the smaller man's shoulder. "They've got their reasons," he said.

Seb whirled on him. "Yeah, so?"

"They wrote the University ahead of time," said Professor Yumi. "I may not be your professor, but I don't believe I can show my face at the University if I don't send you back."

"That's your problem," Seb snapped at her.

Professor Yumi's expression didn't change. "Correct," she said. "Let me put things another way, Mr. Black, so that you may understand why that is also _your_ problem. You are a mage, and a powerful one at that." (Seb preened.) "One of your fellow mages was kidnapped, if briefly, by slavers. He is supposedly fine, but we haven't seen him since, and one of _your_ schoolmates has vanished with him. Your professor is missing, presumed _dead_." The professor paused. Her lips were pressed flat. "Come out of the mountains with us and go home," she finally said.

Seb stared at her for a long moment. Then he looked around at the rest of the group. "I get it," he finally said. "I'll go back." He narrowed his eyes at Kilik. "You're on thin fuckin' ice, though, Kils. Don't let this be the last time I see you."

Kilik grinned back, calm as ever. "It won't," he promised. "I'm just going to visit some family."


	9. Epilogue.

They bury their dead in the mountains, eke eternal homes from the cold red rocks to service their beloved deceased. They burn their dead in the desert, send smoke billowing into the sky to tell the whole world of their grief.

Our families tie us to pasts not our own. We fold our secrets like pages into the stories of our lives, weigh the freedom of lies against the freedoms of truth. We are scholars; we are soldiers; we are trying to save each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some final thanks:
> 
> To my artist @azroazizah again, this time for all of her unwavering support. This fic changed so much over the course of this resbang, and I'm eternally grateful for your patience with me.
> 
> To my beta @arialis again, for ironing out every last point of potential confusion. There was a lot of exposition to sort through and this fic would have been poorer without you.
> 
>  **Links:** [ [my tumblr](https://soundofez.tumblr.com) | [fic post](https://soundofez.tumblr.com/post/190292389228/we-fill-the-skies) ] [ [@azroazizah](https://azroazizah.tumblr.com/) | [art #1](https://azroazizah.tumblr.com/post/190302886225/my-hand-is-numb-but-boi-its-so-worth-it-my-art) | (more art TBA) ]  
> [ beta prime: [@arialis](https://arialis.tumblr.com) ] [ support: [@goonlalagoon](https://goonlalagoon.tumblr.com) | [@happyisahabit](https://happyisahabit.tumblr.com) | [@mystery-shrouded](https://mystery-shrouded.tumblr.com) | [@victoriapyrrhi](https://victoriapyrrhi.tumblr.com) ]  
> [ [event tumblr](https://resbangmod.tumblr.com/) ]
> 
> Oscar, Harv, Jack, and Kim's story will continue in **Follow the Rain Home**.

**Author's Note:**

> expect part two in the next decade maybe. in the meantime, this entire au with the magic and whatnot is already a book that is free, fancy that, [now please go read beanstalk.](https://ejadelomax.com/leaguesandlegends/beanstalk/) ~~maybe don't think too hard about how this timeline works with that one though, because i definitely haven't and i don't intend to.~~


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